This Game of Murder

Chapter XXII

Like the letter Gail had shown him on Sunday, this one was typed. From its text no one could have told who it was from, who it was to, or where either lived. It was short, merely expressing a few corny sentiments about how much the writer missed the addressee, then mentioning that he would meet her at the usual place on Wednesday night. The letter was addressed to “Honey,” and was signed, “Love from me.” Even the signature was typed.

Gail returned with two old-fashioned glasses, each containing two ice cubes and loaded to the brim with Scotch. She sat down two feet closer to him than before, which placed her thigh right against his.

Glancing at the glasses, he wondered if the woman hoped to get him drunk — or get both of them drunk, since hers was equally full. There must have been four ounces of Scotch in each.

Lifting her glass, she said, “Cheers.”

He raised his, clinked it against hers and took a bare sip. She took a good-sized gulp. When she leaned forward to set down her glass, her left breast pressed into his arm.

“You hardly drank any at all,” she said reproachfully, examining the level of his glass.

“I like to sip my Scotch,” he said.

“Is that the way you’re supposed to drink it? I really don’t know much about drinking. Bruce drank vodka, and I can’t stand the stuff. I got drunk on it the night we met and haven’t been able to face it since. Mostly I just drank ginger ale with him.”

“Let’s look at the rest of the letters,” he suggested.

She insisted on handing him each one individually, since it gave her an excuse to lean forward each time. And each one she urged him to take another sip of his drink. By the time they were halfway through the stack, she had managed to badger him into emptying his glass.

Hers was empty, too, by then. She rose to fix two more.

The early letters merely expressed vague sentiments somewhat short of protestations of love. They were full of such phrases as “I miss you,” and “I want you,” but they carefully avoided the word “love.” That started to appear after about the sixth letter, and thereafter there were constant assurances of his love. In the tenth there was the expressed wish that he were single so that he could proudly show her off to all his friends. The twelfth was the one she had previously shown him, reporting that his wife refused to discuss divorce.

Marshall could almost visualize the gradual pressure Gail Thomas must have exerted to bring about the increasingly passionate avowals. She struck him as the sort of woman who, even though she regarded men as superior creatures and would willingly bow to the will of her man of the moment, would, at the same time, want to envelop him. He imagined her starting, early in the romance, by insisting that if Bruce didn’t love her, they had better part. Not yet ready for that, Marshall supposed he had fallen into the trap and had admitted his love in order to keep her as a bed partner for a while longer. The next step would have been for her to decide to end the affair because “there was no future in it.” Eventually her panting lover, making one small concession after another each time she decided to end the affair, had gotten himself into the position of having promised to divorce his wife and marry her.

Marshall knew the route, because he had once been subjected to this sort of inexorable campaign when he was a senior in college, the year after Betty had left him. He hadn’t had a wife to get rid of, but otherwise the process had been much the same as he imagined Bruce Case had gone through with Gail. One day he had awakened to the realization that the girl he had been chasing solely for the use of her soft white body seemed to consider them engaged. When he tried to back away, she pinned him down with exact quotes of the things he had whispered in her ear under threat of the withdrawal of her favors. He had finally gotten out of it by being blunter than he had ever been before or since.

Bruce hadn’t seemed to mind the envelopment, though. Maybe, in his case, he had actually been in love.

When the blonde returned with fresh drinks of the same caliber as before, she sat so close to him their bodies pressed together all the way from knee to shoulder.

Immediately she insisted on his sampling the new drink. They clinked glasses again, and when she set her glass down, the elastic top of her blouse slipped a little. When she straightened, both rosebud nipples were peeping out above it.

She seemed totally unconscious of the exposed, but he suspected she had stretched the elastic a bit while in the kitchen in order to cause just this effect. He also noted that her short skirt had hiked up halfway to her hips.

He ignored both views to concentrate on the letter.

The second half of the stack was full of vows of undying love and promises of eventual marriage, as soon as the writer could get rid of his burdensome wife. There was nothing, however, to suggest any murderous intent until he got to the last letter. He found it so interesting, he unconsciously lifted his glass and drained it as he read.

From the corner of his vision he was conscious of the blonde’s pleased expression at his sudden bibulousness. She immediately downed her own drink to keep up.

The letter read:

The letter convinced Marshall of two things: Bruce Case’s murder attempts on Betty hadn’t stemmed merely from spur-of-the-moment desperation to hang onto his luxurious life; and he actually had been enough in love with Gail Thomas to marry her. Perhaps Betty’s insistence on an immediate divorce had brought things to a head, but he had planned to kill her even before he moved his mistress to Runyon City.

The evidence was right here in black and white. For there was no way in the world Bruce could have ever carried a new bride over the threshold of the old Runyon place if he had planned merely to divorce Betty. It could have been his if he were a widower and had inherited it.

Turning toward the blonde, he started to say, “Do you mind if I take this letter—?” and stopped abruptly.

She must have deliberately pulled the wide top of her off-the-shoulder blouse down even more, for its sides were halfway down to her elbows. Her large breasts, totally bared, bulged toward him, thrusting their pink tips within kissing distance. Her knees had fallen apart and her skirt had worked up clear to her hips. She smiled at him blearily, obviously drunker than a kitten full of catnip.

He couldn’t decide whether to be amused or exasperated. Though he happened to be a sparing drinker, he had an enormous tolerance for alcohol, and the eight ounces of Scotch he had consumed had merely put a warm glow in his stomach. But apparently Gail Thomas’ capacity was as low as his was high.

No wonder she had gotten drunk the first time she was with Bruce Case, he thought. She looked on the verge of passing out from two drinks.

“You should have stuck to ginger ale,” he said. “You shouldn’t try to get other people drunk until you learn how to drink yourself. Did you ever drink Scotch before?”

She moved her head slowly from side to side, continuing to smile at him. She seemed to have difficulty keeping her face in focus.

Rising from the sofa, he took both her hands and pulled her to her feet. Staggering against him, she threw her arms about his neck, pressing her naked bosom against his chest.

Disengaging himself, he gently forced her over to the wall and leaned her against it. “Stay right there,” he commanded.

“Okay,” she said cheerily.

He drew the cocktail table out of the way and examined the sofa-bed. It was the type where you merely pulled the seat forward, the back flattened out level with the seat, and you had a double bed. As he made it into a bed, she regarded the operation with alcoholic interest.

“Where do you keep your sheets and blankets?” he asked.

“Unnerneath.”

He assumed she meant underneath the bed. Investigating, he discovered that the front of the sofa opened downward to disclose a space behind it, but it was empty and had no bottom. After contemplating it, he came to the conclusion that you had to remove the bedclothes before making the contraption into a bed. He pushed it back to its sofa position, looked again and was pleased to learn he was right. Beneath the seat was a storage chamber running the width of the sofa.

He drew out folded sheets, two pillows and a blanket, pulled the contrivance out into a bed again and efficiently made it up.

When he straightened from this endeavor and glanced over his shoulder to where he had left the girl, there was nothing there but a skirt and blouse lying on the floor. Swinging the other way, he found her swaying on her feet in the center of the room, stark naked except for her toeless sandals.

She lifted one foot to remove a sandal, lost her balance and started to topple on her face. He made a dash and caught her beneath the arms, just in time to prevent her crashing to the floor. Heaving her erect, he led her over to the bed and made her sit.

In that position she managed to get the sandals off without falling off the bed. She gave him a vacant smile and leaned her head back on one of the pillows, her legs still dangling over the sides and her feet on the floor. He lifted them up onto the bed and drew the top sheet and blanket up over her.

Momentarily her eyes closed, then opened again. “Will you be long?”

He saw no point in telling her he had no intention of joining her, since he suspected that within a few minutes she wouldn’t know whether anyone was in bed with her or not.

“I want to wash up,” he said.

“Okay,” she said sleepily. “I’ll be here.”

He found the bathroom off the kitchenette and waited for five minutes, smoking a cigarette. When he came out, she was sound asleep.

He put the last letter Bruce Case had written her into his pocket, rebound the others with the piece of string and put them back in the desk drawer. Then he turned out the lights, set the spring lock and quietly let himself out.

Checking his watch, he saw it was only nine-thirty. She had managed to knock herself out in an hour and a half.