The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories

Maggie’s Grip

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1975.

I was working the four p.m.-to-midnight trick out of Homicide when the call came in from the Carondelet Precinct, way down on the south side of St. Louis.

I logged the call as coming in at 6:02 p.m., but it was 6:30 by the time I got to the scene, a good ten miles from headquarters.

The address was a two-story frame house, probably fifty years old, but in good condition. In front of it was a police car, a black sedan with MD license plates, and a crowd of onlookers.

Harry Dodge, who had gone through the Police Academy with me a quarter of a century ago, opened the door. I had forgotten that Harry now worked out of the Carondelet Precinct. He had never made it beyond the rank of patrolman and was still in uniform, but one several sizes larger than he wore when we graduated from the academy.

“Hi, Sod,” he said in a pleased voice as I moved inside past him, then poked a finger into my belly. “Hey, you been putting it on, buddy.”

“If I was a pot, I wouldn’t comment about a kettle,” I growled at him.

A lean, leathery-looking man in a tan jacket and a plump woman in a house dress sat in the front room, the man probably fifty, the woman perhaps ten years younger. After closing the door behind me, Harry introduced them as Henry Crowder and his wife Emma, then added that Mrs. Crowder had discovered the body.

I asked both of them how they did, and asked them to please stand by until I could get to them. Then to Harry I said, “Where is it?”

“In the kitchen.”

He led the way into a central hall where we met a tall, graying man just emerging from the kitchen. He was carrying a medical bag.

Coming to a halt, Harry said, “This is Dr. Lischer, Sod, the victim’s doctor. Mrs. Crowder called him instead of us when she discovered the body. After talking to her, he phoned the precinct before he came over.” To the doctor he said, “Sergeant Sod Harris of the Homicide Squad, Doc.”

Shifting his medical bag from his right hand to his left. Dr. Lischer shook hands with me. “Glad to know you, Sergeant. Terrible thing. She was only twenty-eight.”

“They’re all terrible,” I said. “Mind sticking around a few minutes until after I’ve had a look at the body?”

“No, of course not.”

He went on into the front room. Harry and I continued into the kitchen. Another uniformed cop was in there, leaning against the back door. He was in his mid-twenties and looked vaguely familiar.

There was also a corpse in the room. It belonged to a fairly attractive blonde, slim and pleasantly contoured. She was wearing a light cloth coat, unbuttoned and wide open, over a street dress, no hat and an expression of surprise. She lay flat on her back in the center of the kitchen with the handle of what appeared to be a butcher knife protruding from between her breasts. On the floor to the left of her body was an open purse from which a number of items had fallen when it dropped to the floor. To her right was an old-fashioned iron door key. It seemed apparent that she had been stabbed just after entering by the back door, apparently as she was in the act of replacing the key in her voluminous purse.

The young patrolman said, “Hi, Sarge.”

“Hi,” I said. “I know you, but I can’t place from where.”

“Carl Budd. You were on the first homicide call I ever answered, back when I was a rookie. The Thursday-night Strangler.”

“Oh yeah, the guy who sent happy birthday wires to his victims before he killed them.” Glancing around, I spotted on the wall over the stove a rack of knives with black wooden handles similar to that of the murder weapon. They were of assorted sizes, ranging from a small paring knife to a carving knife with an eight-inch blade. The only vacant space looked as though it might accommodate the butcher knife stuck into the corpse.

Seeing me looking at the rack, Harry said, “That’s what we figured, too. The killer grabbed it from there because it was handy.”

Grunting, I looked back down at the dead woman. “What was her name?”

“Joan Turnbell. Mrs. Joan Turnbell, although her husband don’t live here. According to Mrs. Crowder, they’ve been separated about four months, and the victim lived here alone. Mrs. Crowder also has pretty well pinpointed the time of death to within a minute or so of five-thirty.” Glancing at a wall clock, he said, “About an hour and five minutes ago.”

“How’d she pinpoint it?” I asked.

“She heard Mrs. Turnbell come home, then discovered the body only minutes later.”

Although that wasn’t awfully clear to me, I decided the details could wait until I talked to Mrs. Crowder. “She know who did it?” I asked.

Harry shook his head. “Seems to have been a prowler who panicked when she walked in on him. There’s some drawers dumped out in the other rooms. My guess is nobody saw him because he lammed out the back way. If you’ll look out back, you’ll see the yard is enclosed by a high wooden fence that would have kept him from being seen by neighbors if he headed for the alley. At any rate he wasn’t seen.”

“Oh, you’ve asked all those people out front?”

He flushed slightly. “Well, no, but no one has come forward to report seeing anything.”

That was why Harry Dodge was still a patrolman after twenty-five years. If he had been a rookie, I would have jolted him alive with some acid comments on how to make a preliminary investigation, but you can’t do that to a veteran of twenty-five years even if he deserves it.

I said, as pleasantly as I could manage, “Better go see if anyone saw anything before the crowd disperses. Maybe you’d better hit the nearby houses on both sides of the street too, just in case some of the neighbors have gone back inside.”

“Okay,” he said agreeably, and headed for the front of the house.

I went over to peer through the glass pane of the back door into the yard. In mid-March, sunset was about six p.m., and it was just now starting to get dark. It was still light enough, though, to see that the yard was enclosed by a seven-foot-high board fence. At the rear of the yard, some fifty feet away, was a garage that gave onto an alley. Next to it was a gate in the fence, also leading to the alley.

I tried the back door, found it unlocked and stepped out onto the back porch. From it I could see over the top of the fence onto the back porches on either side, which meant anyone on their back porches at the time the killer emerged from the house could have seen him too. I could also see the back porches of the houses whose rears faced this way from the other side of the alley.

I went down the porch steps and along a concrete walk to the garage. The door leading from the yard into the garage was unlocked. A red, two-seat sports car was parked inside. A car radiator will stay warm for a couple of hours after the car has been driven long enough to heat the engine thoroughly, and this one was still warm enough to indicate it had been standing for not much more than an hour. It seemed reasonable to assume that Joan Turnbell had arrived home in that car.

The garage door giving onto the alley was the overhead type. I swung it up, then back down again. It made considerable noise going both ways, the springs creaking loudly and the door settling into place with a subdued slam.

Returning to the kitchen, I told Carl Budd to go across the alley and inquire at each house if any neighbors had seen anyone enter or leave here by the back door an hour or so earlier.

When the young patrolman had left, I stooped to examine the victim’s shoes. They had those thick, ungraceful Italian heels that have become so popular, with metal cleats on them to retard wear.

Rising from my stooped position, I went into the front room. Dr. Lischer had taken a seat there, but when I came in he rose and picked up the medical bag alongside his chair. Apparently he was in more of a hurry than he had indicated.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting, Doctor,” I said. “May I have your report now?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you much except that she’s dead, Sergeant. I understand from Mrs. Crowder here that death occurred about five-thirty. That conforms to the physical condition of the body. Mrs. Crowder phoned me at twenty of six. I called the police, then came over as soon as I could. I had an emergency patient, so I wasn’t able to get here until about six-fifteen. By then the police were already here.”

“I see. I assume you didn’t move the body.”

“Oh, of course not. I also instructed Mrs. Crowder over the phone not to touch anything.”

I gave him an approving nod. “Was Mrs. Turnbell a regular patient of yours?”

“Yes. Mrs. Crowder also, which I assume is why she called me.”

“Any particular condition you were treating Mrs. Turnbell for?”

He shook his head. “When I say she was a regular patient, I merely mean I was her family physician. Aside from an occasional viral infection, she was in generally good health, you see.”

“Okay, Doctor. Thanks for your trouble.”

“You’re welcome, Sergeant. I’m happy to be of service.”

When he had left, I turned to the Crowders. “Just how close of neighbors are you people? Right next door?”

Both nodded. The leathery Henry Crowder pointed toward the dining room. “On that side.”

I looked at his wife. “It was you who discovered the body, Mrs. Crowder?”

“Yes,” she said. “Henry wasn’t even home from work yet. He just came over to keep me company after the police got here.”

“I see. Then actually you have no direct knowledge of events, Mr. Crowder?”

“Just what Emma told me.”

Turning back to Mrs. Crowder, I said, “Just how did you happen to discover the body so quickly after it happened?”

“I was waiting for Joan to come home so I could show her a pattern I had bought. She always got home from work exactly at five-thirty. You could set your clock by it. She worked in a law office at Grand and Gravois as a legal secretary, you know. The lawyers all left at four-thirty, then she could close up when she wanted. She always left there exactly at five-fifteen, and it took fifteen minutes for her to drive home. So I was listening for her.”

“Listening?” I said. “Don’t you mean watching?”

She shook her head. “The fence is too high to watch. But I could always hear her come home because her garage door squeaks and bangs when it’s opened and closed, then I could also hear her heels click on the walk. Today when I heard her, I looked at my kitchen clock, and sure enough it was right at five-thirty. I gave her five minutes to get her coat off and get herself settled, then I came over.” She gave a little shiver. “He must have just barely left when I got here. If I hadn’t waited that five minutes, more than likely I’d be dead too.”

“Possibly,” I agreed. “How did you come over? I mean out your alley gate and in by this one, or out your front door to this front door?”

“Neither. Out the front way, down the walk between our houses, and in by the gate at the bottom of the back porch steps. Don’t ask me why I do that instead of going to Joan’s front door, which would be closer. I just always have. Maybe because we always ended up in the kitchen anyway for coffee.”

“I take it you were on quite friendly terms with Mrs. Turnbell, then.”

“Oh yes, we were close friends.”

I said, “When you came in by that gate, the killer must have just left by the gate into the alley. Did you hear that gate click shut, or anyone running down the alley, or anything at all?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. I went up the porch steps, and was just raising my fist to knock on the back door when I saw through the glass pane in the top of the door that Joan was lying on her back on the kitchen floor. I didn’t notice the knife in her until after I opened the door and went in. Then I almost fainted.” After a moment, she added with a touch of pride, “I didn’t scream, though, like they always do in the movies.”

I didn’t deflate her ego by telling her that women in the movies scream at the sight of bodies because it’s written in the script, and in real life they’re more apt to go into silent shock. I just said, “What did you do?”

“As soon as I could bring myself to move, I ran into the hall to phone Dr. Lischer.” Her tone became apologetic. “I think I knew she was dead the minute I saw that knife in her, so in the back of my mind I knew a doctor wasn’t going to do her any good. But I was so upset, all I could think of was getting Dr. Lischer over here.”

“You did fine,” I assured her. “A doctor had to declare her dead anyway, so it saved bringing some intern all the way from City Hospital. You have any idea who killed her?”

She looked surprised. “How would I know who the burglar was?”

“You figure it was a burglar?”

“What else? I heard one of those policemen say some drawers were dumped out.”

“Yeah, he told me. I haven’t had a chance to check that out yet. I understand Mrs. Turnbell was separated from her husband.”

Mrs. Crowder nodded, then her eyes suddenly widened. “You don’t think...”

When she let it trail off, I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea. Who is he?”

“Addison Turnbell. He works for the Marks Carburetor Company.”

“As what?”

“He’s just a worker on the assembly line.” She sniffed. “He’s always been way below Joan intellectually. She was a trained legal secretary, while he just worked with his hands. I never could understand why she was so crazy about him that she didn’t want to let him go.” After a pause she added, “I never said that to her, of course.”

“Was it an amicable separation?” I asked.

Henry Crowder said laconically. “Hardly.”

Both of looked at him. When he said nothing more, I looked back at his wife.

Emma Crowder said argumentatively, “Joan wasn’t giving him a hard time, Henry. If there was any bad feeling, it was on his side.”

Henry said, “Maybe she wasn’t giving him a hard time, but she wasn’t turning him loose either.” To me he explained, “Ad has another girl he wants to marry, but Joan wouldn’t agree to a divorce. She wanted him back.”

Mrs. Crowder rendered her opinion of this desire by emitting another sniff.

After a short pause, her husband said, “Joan’s mother wanted to see it patched up, too. Last time I saw Ad, he told me she was bugging him with phone calls nearly every night.”

“He has Mrs. Phelps as snowed as he had Joan,” Emma Crowder said with disgust. “Even after the way he’s treated her daughter, she mothers him like he was her own son.”

“Well, Ad has always liked Stella too,” Henry said. “He told me he wished she would stop bugging him to go back to Joan, but otherwise he’s as fond of her as before the breakup.

“How did Mrs. Turnbell’s father feel about the separation?” I asked.

Mrs. Crowder said. “He’s been dead for years. Mrs. Phelps lives alone somewhere out in the west end.”

Taking out my notebook, I wrote the name Stella Phelps in it, then said, “I take it you don’t know her address?”

“No, but Joan kept an address-and-phone-number book on the telephone table in the hall. It should be in there.”

I wrote down the name Addison Turnbell and asked if either knew his address.

“That should be in her book too,” Emma Crowder said. “He’s only a few blocks from here, over on Bates. He moved in with a bachelor friend named Lionel Short, who works at Marks with him.”

I went to the phone table in the central hallway and found both addresses. After writing them in my notebook, I returned to the front room just as Harry Dodge came back in from outside.

“Nothing,” he reported. “No one saw or heard anything at all.”

A moment later Carl Budd came through the central hallway from the kitchen and made a similar report about the neighbors across the alley.

I thanked the Crowders for their help and told them they could go home. As they were leaving, Art Ward from the lab showed up. I took him to the kitchen, told him what I wanted, left him there, and made a tour of the rest of the house while he was doing it.

There were four rooms on the first floor, clustered around the central hall. At the back were a kitchen and a TV room, at the front the parlor and dining room. On one side of the hallway was a bathroom, on the other side were stairways to the basement and second floor.

In the dining room the bottom drawer of the sideboard, containing nothing but linens, had been pulled out and was upended on the floor. In the TV room there was a combination bookcase-desk with a small drawer underneath the desk for stationery and writing implements. This drawer had also been pulled out and upended on the floor.

Those two dumped drawers were the only evidence of disturbance on the first floor.

I climbed to the second floor. There were two bedrooms and a second bath up there. There was no sign of disturbance.

I went down to the basement and gave it a thorough looking-over. Nothing seemed to be out of place there.

Going back upstairs, I checked the other drawers of the dining-room sideboard. One contained a set of sterling silver. Another contained a piggy bank full of dimes.

Art was finished in the kitchen by the time I completed my tour. He reported that he had taken pictures of the body from three different angles and had dusted the butcher knife for prints. There had been none. He wanted to know if it was okay to remove the knife from the body.

When I told him yes, he pulled it out, sealed it in a large manila envelope, marked it as evidence, and we both initialed it.

I said. “There’s no sign of forced entry anywhere. Want to look at the locks on the front and back doors to see if either has been scratched by a picklock?”

He went over to examine the back-door lock, then gave me a wry grin. “I thought that by now everybody had replaced these old-fashioned open-keyhole locks with modern ones. If this was a prowler job, you don’t have to look any further. You can buy a skeleton key in any dime store that will open this.”

Nevertheless I had him examine the front-door lock also, then, in afterthought and just to be thorough, the lock to the basement’s outside door. Neither showed any sign of tampering.

When I had him take photographs of the two dumped drawers, Art began to get it. “Hey,” he said, “this was a setup, wasn’t it? Not a very good one either.”

“The killer didn’t take much time,” I agreed. “But then, maybe he didn’t have much.”

When Art Ward left, I phoned for a morgue wagon and told Harry Dodge and Carl Budd to stand by until it came for the body. Then I drove over to the apartment where Addison Turnbell lived with his friend, Lionel Short.

The apartment building was on Bates, about four short blocks from Joan Turnbell’s house on Dewey.

Turnbell’s apartment was on the ground floor. When I rang the bell, a thin, rather handsome but jaded-looking man of around thirty answered the door. He was in shirt sleeves and had a folded newspaper in his hand.

“Mr. Turnbell?” I asked.

He shook his head. “His apartment-mate.” Over his shoulder he called, “It’s for you, Ad!” Returning to the easy chair from which my ring had roused him, he disappeared behind his newspaper.

A muscular, blond, good-looking man of about the same age came from another room and over to the door. He also was in shirt sleeves, had an apron around his waist, and carried a dish towel.

“My night to do the dishes,” he said in wry apology. “What can I do for you?”

I showed him the badge clipped inside my wallet. “Sergeant Sod Harris of Homicide,” I said. “Mind if I come in?”

His eyes widened and he stepped aside. I put away my wallet, moved past him and waited for him to close the door. The thin, jaded-looking man folded his newspaper, set it aside and stared at me from eyes as widespread as Turnbell’s.

When I was first assigned to Homicide. I used to try to dream up ways to break the news of murder gently to the next of kin. Quite often, I soon learned, it wasn’t news, and even when it was, gentleness didn’t seem to soften the blow. Now, whenever I have the least suspicion that I’m not bringing any news, I just make the bald announcement and watch for reaction.

I said, “Mr. Turnbell, your wife was murdered at five-thirty this afternoon.”

Both men’s eyes became even wider. Turnbell asked on a high note, “Where?”

“In her home.”

“How?”

“With a butcher knife. We think from that set hanging over the stove.”

He licked his lips. “It happened in the kitchen, then, huh?”

I nodded.

“Have you caught the prowler?”

I examined him curiously. “Now, why do you assume it was a prowler?”

His eyes shifted away from me and he licked his lips again. In an oddly defensive tone he said, “Didn’t you say it happened at five-thirty?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, she always arrives home exactly at five-thirty. I used to set my watch by her. You also said it happened in the kitchen. I guess I just assumed she surprised a prowler when she walked in the back door.”

He looked so guilty, I very nearly gave him the customary warning and arrested him on the spot. I held off only because I could hardly believe it was going to be that easy.

It wasn’t, I discovered, when I asked him to account for his time. He could account for every second of it from the time he left work at four-thirty until right now. There was a space during the actual time of the murder when I momentarily thought I might break his alibi, but eventually that checked out too.

It developed that he and his apartment-mate had left work together at four-thirty, had ridden home together on the South Grand bus, and had gotten there at ten after five. Neither had actually checked the time when they walked into the apartment, but both insisted it had to be within a minute or so of five-ten because they made the same bus trip every day and always arrived home at the same time.

Lionel Short said, “I usually look at my watch when we get home, just out of curiosity to see how close to five-ten it is. And we’ve never been more than two minutes off. I didn’t look today because the phone was ringing when we walked in, and I ran to answer it.” He emitted a cackling little laugh. “It was Ad’s girlfriend again.”

I looked at Turnbell. “The girl you planned to marry if you could get your wife to agree to a divorce?”

He looked startled. His apartment-mate emitted another cackling laugh, then explained it by saying, “I was being satiric, Sergeant. It was his mother-in-law. Ad spends half his life talking to her on the phone.”

“Oh,” I said.

Addison Turnbell said wryly, “Tonight we talked for forty minutes.” Then a thought occurred to him. “Hey, I must have been talking to her at the very moment Joan was killed.”

“You were,” Short affirmed. “I did note the time when I returned from the supermarket, and you were still on the phone. It was exactly a quarter to six”

I perked up my ears. That was when I got the momentary hope that I might be able to break Turnbell’s alibi. I said, “You weren’t here at five-thirty, Mr. Short?”

“No. I went out to buy something for dinner. There’s a supermarket just a block away at Grand and Bates. I was gone from about a quarter after five until a quarter of six.”

I contemplated him in silence for some moments before asking, “You sure Mr. Turnbell was still actually talking to his mother-in-law?”

“Of course.” Then he caught the significance of the question and let out another of his cackling little laughs. “You mean maybe Ad tried to con me by talking into a dead phone? You don’t know Mrs. Phelps. Her voice on the telephone carries clear across the room. I could hear her still talking plainly enough even to tell you what she said. She was telling Ad that Joan realized she had been wrong to downgrade him for not having a better job, and had promised to look up to him and make him feel like the man of the house if he would come back. Then, a little later, I heard her say something about having a casserole in the oven, so she had to hang up.”

My hope almost flickered out, but not quite. There was still the possibility that Mrs. Phelps had phoned twice — or that Turnbell had called her back after the first conversation — and that there had been sufficient time between the two calls for Turnbell to make the round trip to the house on Dewey and back. However, that would have to wait until I talked to Mrs. Phelps.

Taking out my notebook, I said to Addison Turnbell, “I’ll need the name of your girlfriend. The real one, I mean.”

He stared at me in frowning silence.

“The girl you plan to marry,” I prompted.

“I know who you mean. What’s she got to do with this?”

I shrugged. “Quite possibly nothing. On the other hand, maybe she got tired of waiting for you to talk your wife into a divorce, and decided to make you an eligible widower. I’ll get to her eventually, whether you give me her name or not. It will be simpler if you cooperate.”

After glumly thinking this over, his face suddenly brightened and he said with an air of triumph, “She couldn’t have killed Joan. She works from four until midnight. She’s working right now.”

“Oh? Where?”

“At Martin’s Steakhouse on Kings Highway. She’s the hostess.”

“I know the place,” I said. “Her name?”

“Sylvia Baumgartner.”

After writing down the name, I put away my notebook and said, “I guess that’s all for now. You’ll stay available, Mr. Turnbell?”

“I wasn’t planning any out-of-town trips,” he said sourly.

“If I want to contact you tomorrow, will you be at work?”

He shook his head. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’ll be here.”

“Fine.” I pulled open the door, then paused and turned. “One last thing. You don’t seem overly grieved at becoming a widower.”

“I was trying to divorce the woman, Sergeant,” he said sardonically. “I wasn’t wishing her dead, but frankly I was fed up to the eyebrows with her. If you want me to pretend, I suppose I could squeeze out a few crocodile tears.”

“Don’t bother on my account,” I said. I went out and pulled the door closed behind me.

Sylvia Baumgartner turned out to be a sleek, brittle redhead in her mid-twenties. She also turned out to have been in full view of the restaurant manager, a dozen waitresses, and a varying number of customers from four p.m., when she started work, until I got there at eight.

Mrs. Stella Phelps lived in an apartment in the 4300 block of Maryland. I got there about eight-thirty.

The victim’s mother was a plump blonde in her mid-fifties with a pleasant but rather moonlike face. She came to the door red-eyed from crying, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. It developed that Addison Turnbell had phoned her to break the news of her daughter’s death while I was en route.

She invited me in, had me sit in an easy chair, and sank onto the sofa across from me. After giving her eyes another dab with her handkerchief, she squared her plump shoulders and smiled bravely.

“I’m not cried out yet, Sergeant,” she said. “But I know you have a job to do, so I’ll postpone my grief until a more appropriate time. Joan was my only child, you know, and since my husband died ten years ago, she’s all I had left. Ad has always been as close to me as a son, but of course he’s no blood relation, and he and Joan were separated, so he may not think of me as his mother-in-law anymore. I’m sure they were going to get back together eventually, but now it’s too late.”

She touched the handkerchief to her eyes again. I took advantage of the momentary pause in the flow of words to insert, “Your son-in-law says he was talking to you on the phone at the time your daughter was killed.”

“Yes. When he phoned me he said you would probably ask about that.” She cocked a quizzical eyebrow at me. “Surely you don’t suspect him of killing Joan, do you?”

“The spouse is always a routine suspect in a homicide, Mrs. Phelps. I haven’t accused Mr. Turnbell of anything. I’ll be quite happy to clear him as a suspect if you can confirm his alibi. Do you recall just what time you phoned him and how long you talked?”

“I can tell you to the minute, Sergeant, because I had a casserole in the oven that had to come out at ten of six. I turned on the oven at five-ten, then immediately dialed Ad. That fellow he’s staying with answered — Lionel something. I never liked the man. I think he’s been a bad influence on Ad. There is always potential for trouble in a marriage when the husband continues his friendship with a chronic bachelor. The fellow has never been married, you know, which seems to me unnatural for a man past thirty. While Ad and Joan were still together, he was always coming around and luring Ad to go off and do bachelor things with him, such as bowling, shooting pool and playing poker. I think he’s the one who introduced Ad to that little tramp who caused the final breakup between Ad and my daughter.”

I began to understand how the telephone conversation had lasted so long. When she paused for breath, I quickly slipped in, “When did your phone conversation end?”

She looked surprised. “I thought I already told you. At ten of six. I kept checking my wristwatch because of the casserole, and when it was ten to six, I told Ad I had to hang up. It was just when I was beginning to make some progress, too. He had admitted he was still fond of Joan, and if things were different — if she stopped nagging him about going out with his friend Lionel, for instance — maybe the marriage could still work. I was really beginning to feel quite encouraged that they would patch things up. But maybe at that very moment the poor girl was being killed by the fiend who murdered her.”

That was interesting. Addison Turnbell had said to me, “I was trying to divorce the woman, Sergeant. I wasn’t wishing her dead, but frankly I was fed up to the eyebrows with her.” Yet a couple of hours earlier he had hinted to his mother-in-law that reconciliation was still possible. Of course, that possibly could have been simply to shut her up.

After a brief pause Mrs. Phelps opened her mouth to say something else, but I beat her to it by asking quickly, “What time does your wristwatch show right now?”

Looking at it, she said, “Eight-forty-two. It keeps very good time. I haven’t set it for weeks, yet it’s always right with the time they announce on television.”

She reminded me of the guy who, when you asked him the time, told you how to build a watch.

My watch, which also keeps very good time, showed eight-forty-two as well. I got to my feet. “I guess that pretty well clears your son-in-law, Mrs. Phelps. Can you think of any enemies your daughter may have had who would resort to this?”

“Joan?” she said, obviously shocked by the idea. “Why, everyone absolutely loved her. I’m sure it was just a prowler.”

“Perhaps,” I conceded, and made my escape before she could get started on another monologue.

I drove back to headquarters, set up a file folder on the case and typed the chronological record of events so far, beginning with the phone call from the Carondelet Precinct. When I read it over, the suspicion I’d had all along crystallized into certainty: Joan Turnbell had not been murdered by a prowler surprised in the midst of burglarizing the house, but had been deliberately murdered. That much was perfectly clear. Nothing else about the case was, though.

When I got home shortly after midnight, Maggie was asleep. When I awakened in the morning, her side of the bed was empty. The bedside clock told me it was eight a.m.

Ordinarily I sleep until at least nine when pulling the night trick, but today I felt the need for Maggie’s counsel. Getting up, I yelled for her to put the coffee on, and went into the bathroom to shower and shave.

When I entered the kitchen, dressed, twenty minutes later, she was pouring my coffee. She gave me my usual good-morning kiss, still with considerable gusto even after twenty-five years of marriage, and asked what I wanted for breakfast.

“Just toast and conversation,” I said.

She dropped bread into the toaster, put butter and jam in front of me, then sat across the table from me and cocked an inquiring eyebrow. “Problems?” she asked.

“Just one. I’ve got a murder that was supposed to look like a prowler job, but wasn’t. The guy with the only motive I can unearth has an ironclad alibi.”

“Tell me about it, and maybe we can break it,” she suggested.

She wasn’t being egotistical. Over the years her hard common sense has unraveled a number of snarls that had me baffled.

The toast popped up and I waited until she brought it to me before beginning. Then I described in detail everything that had happened the night before.

“It couldn’t have been a prowler surprised in the act,” I concluded. “And not just because those two dumped drawers were so obviously staged. There was no way he could have avoided hearing her arrive home in plenty of time to scoot out the front door before she came in the back. If that noisy garage door hadn’t alerted him, he still couldn’t have missed hearing her steel heel cleats clicking along that fifty-foot stretch of concrete walk from the garage to the back porch. If the next-door neighbor heard both sounds, why couldn’t the killer?”

“He could have been deaf,” Maggie suggested.

I made an impatient gesture. “Who ever heard of a deaf burglar? It would be too much of an occupational hazard.”

She grinned at me. “Okay, so he had to hear her coming. Which means he deliberately waited there in the kitchen, intending to kill her.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what’s your problem?”

I paused in the act of spreading jam on toast to stare at her. “My problem is that the only guy with a motive to kill her was four blocks away when she died, talking to her mother on the phone.”

“While his apartment-mate was out shopping. Or says he was shopping.”

I continued to stare at her.

“His friend did it for him,” Maggie said. “While he deliberately kept his mother-in-law on the phone in order to give himself an alibi.”

Setting down my toast, I folded my hands in my lap and peered at her until she blushed.

“You don’t like it?” she asked.

“Oh, I think it’s a remarkable theory,” I said with irony. “I’m curious about one small point, though. How did Turnbell induce his friend to commit murder for him?”

“I can’t do all your work for you,” she informed me. “Maybe he paid him.”

“Out of his salary putting together carburetors on an assembly line?”

“Maybe Lionel Short wants somebody killed too,” she said with sudden inspiration. “And next time, Addison Turnbell is going to do it while Short makes himself an alibi.”

I gave my head a pitying shake. “You’re losing your grip, light of my life. If there were collusion between Turnbell and Short to murder the woman, why would Short admit being gone from the apartment at the time of the murder? They could have alibied each other simply by swearing neither was out of the other’s sight.”

She blushed again, then made a face at me. “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

“He could have hired a killer, though,” I said thoughtfully. “A pro, I mean.”

“Out of his salary putting together carburetors on an assembly line?” she mimicked me.

I picked up my toast again. The phone rang and Maggie got up to answer it. She caught it on the kitchen extension, which was a wall phone above the counter next to the stove. I was facing that way.

After saying hello, she cupped a palm over the mouthpiece, assumed a martyred expression and said in a low voice. “Grace Fenwick.”

Grace was one of Maggie’s more long-winded friends. I finished my toast to the accompaniment of only occasional monosyllabic comments by Maggie and the steady drone of Grace’s high-pitched voice coming from the phone.

I drained my coffee cup and was just getting ready to get up for more when Maggie gestured me to remain seated, picked up the pot from the stove and carried it over to the table to fill my cup.

“How’d you get away from old gabby so fast?” I inquired.

Maggie placed a finger to her lips and tossed her head in the direction of the phone. Looking that way, I saw that she had not hung it up, but had merely laid it down on the counter.

In a low voice Maggie said, “She’ll never know I’m gone. She never stops talking long enough for an answer. But she might hear you when you talk so loud.”

She went back to the phone. I gazed at her for a time, then left my second cup of coffee untouched, went into the bedroom and put on my necktie and suit coat.

Maggie was still listening to the telephone when I gave her a kiss on the free ear and whispered into it, “You haven’t lost your grip after all, doll. You solved it.” I continued on out.

On my way down to Carondelet I did a considerable amount of thinking. I knew I had a solved case, but proving it was going to be a problem.

I had the advantage that Addison Turnbell hadn’t seemed very bright. Actually he had been more lucky than clever, because his murder scheme had been pretty harebrained. It had contained so many possible pitfalls that its working could be ascribed to nothing less than improbable luck. His mother-in-law could have asked a question that required an answer; his apartment-mate could have returned before he got back; Emma Crowder could have arrived thirty seconds earlier and have seen him leaving by the back gate.

Anyone stupid enough to devise such a murder plan might be stupid enough to fall for a bluff, I decided.

It wasn’t quite nine a.m. when I rang the apartment bell. Addison Turnbell himself answered the door. He was in pajamas and a robe, but apparently had been up for a time, because his hair was combed and he looked freshly shaved. He greeted me without enthusiasm, but without surprise either, and invited me in.

“Where’s your friend?” I inquired as he closed the door behind me.

“Still sleeping. He went out on the town last night after you left us. Have a seat?”

“No, thanks. Mr. Turnbell, you are under arrest for investigation, suspicion of homicide.” I took out the little card and read him his constitutional rights.

When I finished, he gazed at me with his mouth open for some time before finally saying in a high voice. “You’re arresting me for what?”

“For murdering your wife,” I explained. “I think it must have been a spur-of-the-moment thing instead of something you elaborately planned, because the situation that developed was too accidental. All of a sudden you found yourself on the phone with a woman who talked so interminably that she probably wouldn’t miss you if you left her talking to herself even for as long as fifteen minutes. Your apartment-mate was off to the store, so he wouldn’t know you had left the apartment. And your wife was due home in a very few minutes. I imagine you still have a key to the house. You got there just before your wife did, hurriedly upended a couple of drawers in an attempt to make it look like a burglary, stabbed her as she walked in, wiped off your prints and took off for here again. By walking fast you probably made the round trip in no more than ten minutes.”

“You’re crazy,” he said huskily, licking his lips. “You’ll never prove it.”

“Oh, but I have proved it. Not by your mother-in-law, because she still thinks she was talking to you all the time, instead of to herself. Your wife’s neighbor across the alley happened to be trying out a brand-new Polaroid camera from his back porch just as you came out the back door, and he noted the time was exactly five thirty-two p.m. I have the print right here.”

As I reached for my breast pocket, he broke for the kitchen, presumably meaning to flee by the back door. I don’t know where he thought he was going in pajamas, a robe and slippers, but it became an academic question when he tripped over a kitchen chair and sprawled flat on his stomach.

I put a knee on his back and cuffed his wrists behind him before I helped him to his feet.