This Game of Murder

Chapter III

When Marshall got home, he found his father reading the Sunday paper in the big front room. Jonas Marshall was an older version of his son, with a long, lean figure, still well-muscled at sixty, and a full head of iron-gray hair. As owner, publisher and editor of the Runyon City News, the town’s only newspaper, he was Kirk Marshall’s employer as well as his parent.

Their father-son relationship was more congenial than their editor-reporter relationship. Jonas Marshall had definite ideas on what made a good newspaperman and he was a strict taskmaster. Someday he expected to turn the paper over to his son, and he wanted to be sure Kirk understood it from the ground up. Since he had gotten out of school nine years earlier, Kirk Marshall had worked at every job from copy boy to editorial writer. For the past five years he had operated as a roving reporter, and was considered the paper’s ace by everyone on the staff except his father. Jonas never seemed quite satisfied with his son’s efforts. As they were equally strong-minded, they often clashed on matters of policy.

However, outside of the newspaper office, they had a quite cordial relationship.

“Lydia called,” his father greeted Marshall. “She wants you to phone back. Your mother announced that dinner will be in twenty minutes, so if you plan to make cocktails, you’d better hurry your dressing for dinner.”

It was Kirk Marshall’s chore to mix before-dinner cocktails, and it had become such a ritual that Jonas Marshall wouldn’t have thought of taking over merely because his son arrived home a little late. It was typical that he had simply sat and waited for the family bartender to show up.

Marshall carried his golf bag up to his room, fished the dirty laundry from it and dropped it into the bathroom hamper. His dressing for dinner consisted only of changing his rumpled cotton golf slacks for a pair of dress slacks, and changing his shoes. He was back downstairs within three minutes.

His mother was standing before the stove when he entered the kitchen. Sylvia Marshall was a plump, matronly woman five years her husband’s junior. She was almost universally liked, because she was unable to find fault in anyone at all, but she was also universally regarded as a trifle addled, in a nice sort of way. She had vast trouble remembering faces, even occasionally regarding her husband and son with a puzzled expression.

Marshall bent to kiss the back of her neck and said, “Hi, Mom.”

Glancing over her shoulder, she smiled vaguely. “Oh, it’s you. I think your father is waiting for you to mix a cocktail.”

“He usually is,” Marshall said, getting a tray of ice from the refrigerator.

He mixed only two martinis, as his mother didn’t drink. He carried one in to his father, then carried the other into the den and dialed Lydia Harrison’s number.

When her clear voice answered the phone, he said, “Dad told me you called.”

“Yes,” she said. “I just wanted you to know Uncle George and Aunt Ruth drove back to Buffalo, in case you have any plans for me tonight.”

He took a sip of his cocktail. “What do you feel like?”

“Umm...”

He laughed. “There’s a good show on at the State.”

“You must not have heard me,” she said. “I said Umm...”

“I’ll be over at eight p.m.,” he told her. “Shall I dress, in case you decide you want to go out later?”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’m just going to be wearing perfume.”

Back in the front room Jonas Marshall laid aside his paper and raised his glass in a silent toast.

When both had sipped their drinks, the father said, “Read today’s paper?” He referred to the Buffalo paper, as the Runyon City News didn’t publish on Sunday.

“Glanced at it,” Marshall said.

“There’s a feature article on the cat burglar. Seems he’s attracting the attention of the big-city papers. Barney Meister isn’t going to like it.”

“Why?”

“The story isn’t very kind to the local police. Implies they’re a bunch of Keystone Kops whom the cat burglar has been running circles around.”

“That’s hardly fair,” Marshall said. “Personally I think Barney is a pretty good chief. He’ll net this man before long.”

“He’d better, before somebody gets killed. The man must be a psycho, carrying that axe or whatever it is around with him. What’s the score to date? About ten burglaries?”

“Nine. But only eight losses. He didn’t get anything from the Ferris home. Left his pillowcase full of loot when he swiped at Mrs. Ferris with his weapon and ran.”

Sylvia Marshall called from the dining room, “Dinnertime.”

After dinner Marshall decided to take Lydia at her word and not dress. He drove over to her place wearing the same sport shirt he had donned after his shower at the country club.

Lydia Harrison was originally from Buffalo and had no relatives in Runyon City. She had come there two years before, fresh out of college, to take a job in the advertising department of the Runyon City News. She lived alone in a three-room downtown apartment only a block from the newspaper office.

She answered the door barefoot and wearing a quilted housecoat. She was a smaller woman than Betty Case, being only about five feet three and possessing a smaller bone structure. There was nothing delicate about her, though. She had a full, rounded figure and quite a robust chest. Her hair, eyes and complexion were all dark and her face rather plain. But she had such dancing eyes and such a vivacious expression, she gave the effect of being quite pretty until you took close inventory of her features.

Closing the door behind him, Marshall said, “I thought you were going to wear just perfume.”

“I couldn’t answer the door that way, silly,” she said. “Suppost it hadn’t been you?”

She put her arms about his neck and kissed him on the lips. Then she released him and padded across the front room to the bedroom door, casually slipping off her housecoat en route. There was nothing beneath it but Lydia. At the doorway she smiled back over her shoulder and gave her round little bottom an inviting wiggle.

One of the many things he liked about Lydia Harrison was her absolute lack of pretense. She had a healthy, uninhibited liking for sex and she made no attempt to shield her desires from him. In the early days of their relationship she had somewhat startled him, for she gave the impression in public of being rather demure. She still behaved quite conventionally in front of other people, but when they were alone she could be pretty earthy. When she had the urge to be loved, she seldom wasted time with preliminaries. She usually matter-of-factly announced her desire, sometimes in rather down-to-earth terms, then took off her clothes.

When he reached the bedroom door she had tossed her housecoat over a chair and was lying on the bed. She assumed a rather lascivious posture and grinned at him.

“Hurry up,” she said. “I’ve been panting ever since we talked on the phone.”

He deliberately took his time undressing, getting some kind of mildly sadistic pleasure from her increasing impatience. He carefully hung his slacks and sport shirt on hangers in the closet, then neatly placed his shoes side-by-side on the floor and dropped his socks into them. Her expression became pleading when he slowly folded his undershirt and shorts before laying them on the dresser.

When he finally approached the bed, she raised to a seated position, threw her arms about his neck and fell back again, forcibly pulling him down across her body. Her mouth, wide open, fastened on his, but first she whispered two short, earthy words.

He obeyed her request...

Later, lying with her head on his shoulder, he considered their relationship. Though she had gone with no other man during the two years they had known each other, and he had gone with no other woman, there was no formal commitment between them. She never spoke wistfully of marriage, or even inquired if he loved her. The word “love” had never been mentioned between them.

There had been other women in his life since Betty, but never for this long a period. He always backed skittishly away the moment they began to hint at marriage, which sometimes was on the first date; and never, except in Lydia’s case, had it been more than three months after the first date. Because Lydia didn’t try to hem him in, he felt as though he were a free agent, even though they had become nearly constant companions.

Sometimes he wondered if he was in love with her but, while he liked her tremendously, he didn’t feel the same overwhelming yearning for her he had once felt for Betty, and which he still occasionally felt in a much lesser degree when he thought back to their youthful romance. He told himself that he had outgrown such teen-age emotions and that it probably wasn’t fair to Lydia to expect her to arouse the same feelings in him at thirty-one that Betty had aroused when he was a teen-ager. Still the shadow of that overpowering passion hung over him, preventing him from surrendering himself completely to any other woman.

The affair of that afternoon in the woods further complicated things. It not only completely changed the formal relationship of the past ten years between Betty and him, it made it seem probable that she would be a free woman before long. He knew Betty was a believer in conventional morality, and he was reasonably sure she would never have allowed him to touch her if she expected to stay with her husband.

He wondered what he would do if she left Bruce. His heart pounded at the thought of again having her to himself, yet he couldn’t quite imagine completely giving up Lydia.

Maybe he ought to see a psychiatrist, he thought. It couldn’t be normal to be in love with two women at the same time.

They spent the whole evening alternately making love and dozing in each other’s arms. Marshall had planned to go home about midnight, but they both fell asleep with the light on. The phone awakened them.

The phone was in the front room. Lydia stumbled to it, still half asleep, and Marshall could hear her say, “Hello.”

Glancing at his watch, he was startled to see it was three a.m. He bounced up fully awake and went to the doorway.

“For you,” Lydia said in an abashed voice. “It’s your dad.”

Even before he took the phone Marshall knew it must be something important, for his father wouldn’t have called merely to find out why he wasn’t home yet. He was beyond the age where his father would think of attempting to exercise any parental authority.

“Yes, Dad?”

Jonas Marshall growled, “It was very enterprising of you to arrange with the police desk to phone you at any time of the day or night when a story broke. It would have been even more enterprising to let them know where the hell to reach you, so your hard-working father could get some sleep.”

“The police called?” Marshall asked.

“Yeah. Pat Sullivan’s on the desk. There’s been a shooting out at the old Runyon place.”

Marshall felt a chill move along his spine. That was Betty and Bruce Case’s home. Though both Betty’s parents were dead and the family home was now hers, no one in Runyon City ever referred to the landmark as the Case home. It was still “the old Runyon place,” and probably would remain that as long as it stood, no matter who occupied it.

“Not Betty?” he said a trifle unsteadily.

“The only information Pat had was that there had been a shooting. Better get out there.”

“All right, Dad. Thanks for relaying the message.”

Hanging up, he moved past Lydia into the bedroom and quickly began to dress. She watched him from the bedroom doorway.

“A news story?” she asked.

“There’s been a shooting out at the old Runyon place,” he said in no particular tone.

Lydia was aware that Betty Case had been a teen-age romance of Marshall’s, because he had once casually mentioned that they had been high-school sweethearts. He had volunteered no information other than that, however, and she had never questioned him about it. She must have suspected that Betty was still somewhat special to him, though, for on the rare occasions he and Lydia encountered the Cases socially, Lydia invariably examined Betty in the estimating manner of a woman studying a rival, and he had caught a similar look in Betty’s eyes when she examined Lydia.

“Betty?” Lydia asked.

“Dad didn’t know. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you at the office in the morning.”

He gave her a quick kiss on the forehead and hurried across the front room to the door.