This Game of Murder

Chapter XXI

As he drove back toward the newspaper office, Marshall visualized what would have happened if Betty, starting downstairs, had tripped over the wire. Going up, young Bud had suffered only a jolting fall to hands and knees, but a headlong pitch down those steep stairs would almost certainly have broken some bones, and might even have killed her. At best it would have left her helpless enough to be finished off with a final blow, which could be assumed by investigating officers to have also resulted from the fall.

There wasn’t the least doubt that it had been a murder attempt. And it would have worked if Bud hadn’t forgotten his towel. Marshall could imagine Bruce Case’s consternation when, from the kitchen or wherever he was at the time, he heard his son slam into the house and rush up the stairs. There would, of course, have been no time to head him off. Ten-year-old boys normally move at upsetting speed even when they aren’t in a hurry. Young Bud, on what to him was an urgent mission, probably had resembled a small tornado. He must have been tripping over the wire at the top of the stairs before it fully registered on his father that he had returned to the house.

Marshall couldn’t understand how he could have been so dense that the true explanation of what had happened that night hadn’t occurred to him long ago. His only consolation was that it obviously hadn’t occurred to anyone else either.

But now it seemed so simple. When Bruce Case’s first murder attempt failed, he had made another the next night. It was Bruce who had planted the rope and cut the screen. And the meat cleaver hadn’t been picked out at random as a convenient weapon because he thought he heard a prowler in the house. He had chosen it because it would leave a wound similar to one inflicted by the cat burglar’s axe. He had meant to kill Betty and let the cat burglar take the blame.

His theory clarified a motive, too. If you discounted the jealousy motive the prosecution hoped to establish against Betty, there wasn’t a reason in the world for her to kill her husband. But there would have been a vast advantage for Bruce if Betty died. A divorce would have left him with nothing but his mediocre law-practice income; her death would have left him a wealthy widower. And she had just delivered an ultimatum that he would either arrange a quiet divorce or she would arrange it herself and drag his mistress into court as corespondent.

Then another thought struck him. Betty, knowing of the first murder attempt, must have realized the instant she turned on the light and saw that she had shot Bruce instead of the cat burglar that this had been a second attempt. He could understand her remaining silent before her arrest, for she probably thought that if it could be passed off as an accident it would be better for Bud not ever to know his father was a would-be murderer. But once she was charged with murder herself, why on earth hadn’t she spoken?

Another odd thing was that Bruce had still been sleeping in the study after his first attempt. It hardly seemed conceivable that Betty would have allowed him to remain in the house after he had attempted to kill her.

He decided he had better have a conference with Betty to get loose ends tied up before going to either the district attorney or the chief of police. And that meant waiting until visiting hours at the County Jail the next morning.

There was time, he thought. Her case wasn’t scheduled to come up before the grand jury until Friday, and the next day was only Tuesday.

Meantime he thought he might as well turn up all the evidence he could to support the premise that Bruce, not Betty, had planned murder. And there just might be something in Bruce’s love letters to Gail Thomas to support the premise.

He decided to accept her invitation to drop by that evening.

Promptly at eight o’clock that night he parked in front of the laundry at 126 Howard Street. Climbing the stairs, he rapped on the door of Gail Thomas’ flat. This time there was no delay. It opened instantly.

He was a little startled by the girl’s garb. She wore a tight red skirt which came to an inch above her knees, white sandals with straps running between the first and second toes, and a white, off-the-shoulder blouse whose elastic top formed a horizontal line across her spectacular bosom, no more than an inch above the nipples.

“You’re right on time,” she said, smiling at him. “Come on in.”

As he moved past her he caught a whiff of Intimate perfume and simultaneously realized she wasn’t wearing a brassiere. She moved aside only slightly to let him pass, at the same time turning sideways so that he had to squeeze by within an inch of the protruding part of her anatomy. He would have been less than human if he hadn’t glanced down. Her bosom pushed out the elastic top of the blouse so far that he could see down the cleft between her breasts dear to her navel. There was nothing at all beneath the blouse.

He felt a touch of alarm. Her provocative garb seemed the sort of thing a woman would wear when expecting a male caller only if she expected the evening to develop into something cozy. And he had no intention of complicating his already tangled love life.

Even if he had, Gail Thomas would have been his last choice. Not because she didn’t attract him, for under other circumstances he would have been delighted to cuddle with such a delectable blonde. But he shuddered to think what Betty’s reaction would be if she ever suspected he had succumbed to the same woman who had stolen her husband. He suspected that, this time, she might be inclined to commit murder in earnest.

He was a little reassured to see that the sofa-bed was still made up as a sofa. He moved to a chair but didn’t sit, because after closing the door, the blonde merely moved to the center of the room and smiled at him again. Her overabundent breasts jiggled up and down engagingly when she moved.

“What do you drink?” she asked.

“Nothing, thanks. I really only came to get a look at those letters.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “I thought maybe you’d stay awhile. I have the whole evening free.”

He hoped fervently she hadn’t done something like breaking another date for him, for it was his intention to get out of there as soon as he could, within the bounds of common courtesy and after seeing the letters.

It hadn’t even occurred to him that when she asked if they couldn’t be friends, she had meant other than platonic friendship. It probably should have, for while he wasn’t conceited enough to think every woman he met was prepared to throw herself at him, this wasn’t the first time a new female acquaintance had shown rather eager interest. He wasn’t wealthy, but his family was well-to-do and he was single. He was cynically aware that locally he was regarded as an eligible bachelor who would be a prize catch. Gail Thomas was fresh out of a lover, and being the sort of woman who needed a man to tell her what to do, she naturally wouldn’t overlook the first eligible male who hove into view.

He probably was the first, too, he thought. She had been squired around by out-of-town reporters and photographers for a week and a half now, but probably every one of them had a wife back home.

Because essentially he was a kindly man, he didn’t want to rebuff her bluntly after all her preparations. He said, “After we go through the letters, I’ll have some beer, if you have any.”

“Oh, my,” she said, distressed. “I thought you’d be the type who drank Scotch or bourbon. I have practically everything but beer.”

She looked so upset, he felt sorry for her. Apparently she had especially stocked up for him.

He said, “I like Scotch. But first can I see the letters?”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll fix a drink while you’re looking at them. Why are you so interested in them, anyway? Are you going to write about them in your paper?”

Her tone suggested that she wouldn’t mind. Some out-of-town newsman had missed a mighty chance for a scoop, he thought. Probably she would have agreeably handed the whole stack to the first reporter who asked her for them, if it had occurred to anyone to inquire of her if Bruce Case had ever written her any love letters. Syndicated and published a few at a time, they could have titillated the reading public from coast to coast for a week.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m not interested in them as much as a reporter as I am as an amateur detective. I just like to see everything that has any bearing on the case.”

She looked puzzled, but she didn’t press it. Going over to the writing desk, she pulled open the drawer containing the letters. He sat down.

She carried the stack of envelopes over to the sofa-bed, sat down and laid it on the low cocktail table in front of the sofa. Untying the string, she looked over at him.

“Come over here and we’ll go through them together.”

There was nothing he could do but comply. Rising, he walked over and sat about two feet away from her. She leaned forward to pick up the top envelope, the movement causing the top of her blouse to fall forward so that he glimpsed one rosebud nipple, oddly tiny in the center of its vast white mound.

“They’re all in order,” she said, handing him the envelope. “This is the first one, written about three months after we met. He didn’t write real often, because I had phones both at home and at the beauty shop where I worked, so usually he called if he just wanted me to know he was coming in. He only dropped me a line about once a mouth.”

“I see,” Marshall said, pulling the sheet from the envelope.

She continued to lean forward, her elbows on her knees, and he was conscious of that rosebud in the corner of his vision. Then, to his relief, she not only sat up, but got up as he started to read.

“I’ll fix us a couple of drinks while you’re looking at that,” she said. “We can sip as we go through them.”

“Fine,” he said, finally able to concentrate on the letter.

“On the rocks will be okay.”

She moved on into the kitchen.