This Game of Murder

Chapter VIII

George Reed answered the door to their ring. Marshall introduced the chief, they were invited in, and found Betty and Audrey Reed in the big front room. Betty’s last surviving blood relative was a slim, still-shapely woman in her early fifties with smartly styled gray hair and the chronic assurance of the typical club woman. Both she and Betty wore conservative street dresses suitable for women in mourning.

Reed introduced his wife to the chief, then said, “You remember Kirk Marshall, don’t you, dear?”

“Of course,” she said, giving Marshall a smile of cultivated charm. “It’s been a lot of years, though, hasn’t it, Kirk? You were just a boy last time we met. It was lovely of your mother to take over here until we arrived.”

“She enjoyed it,” Marshall assured her.

Barney Meister had waited patiently for the social amenities to be gotten over. Now he said, “A little something has come up, Mrs. Case. Mind if we look around the place a bit?”

Betty looked surprised. “You’ve already gone through every room in the house.”

“I mean outside.”

“The grounds? Why certainly. Look anywhere you please.”

Meister and Marshall excused themselves and went back outside. George Reed trailed along to see what they were up to.

The driveway which curved past the front of the house made a loop past the wide door of a three-car garage set at right angles to the house. The door was counterbalanced to swing upward and fold against the ceiling when it was opened. The chief heaved it up.

All three stalls were occupied. In one was the station wagon Bruce Case used to drive, in the second was Betty’s little sports car, and in the third was Bruce’s fourteen-foot fiberglas boat on a trailer. The boat was powered by an outboard motor.

The chief walked into the garage and peered into the boat. Both the anchor line and the mooring rope were the same type of half-inch hemp which had been tied to the roof air-vent pipe. Neither had been recently cut, however, and were much darker in color from countless immersions in lake water than the fragment found on the roof.

At the rear of the garage were some narrow shelves containing tools and various kinds of hardware. One shelf was devoted to fishing equipment, and lying in its center was the remains of an unused coil of half-inch hemp.

Pulling the two-foot segment from his pocket, the chief matched its cut end to the cut end of the coil. Standing next to him, Marshall could see even without the aid of any magnification that the ends matched. He felt a queasiness form in his stomach.

George Reed was standing on the chief’s opposite side. He said, “You got a match there. What’s it mean?”

“This was tied to the roof vent the night your brother-in-law was shot,” Meister said, indicating the two-foot length.

The banker mulled this over. “You mean this so-called cat burglar stole the rope he used right here from the garage?”

The burly chief shook his head. “Since the coil’s still here, this two-foot section must have been cut off in the garage, but not by the cat burglar. Why would he take only a two-foot length of rope when it must be fifteen feet from the air vent to the second-floor hall window?”

It took several moments for Reed to digest this. When he finally had, he frowned. “Are you implying there was no burglar here that night, but somebody arranged things to make it seem there had been?”

“Implying, no,” the chief said. “I’m saying it right out.”

He strode out of the garage and mounted the porch steps with Marshall right behind him. The plump banker scurried to keep up.

With a policeman’s caution about entering private premises without invitation, the chief didn’t barge right in, even though his previous invitation presumably would have covered the situation. He paused in front of the door until Reed got there and courteously waited for the banker to open it and precede him inside.

As they all entered the front room together, the flustered banker said, “I think the chief is going to make some kind of accusation, Betty. Don’t say anything at all.”

Both his wife and Betty looked at him in astonishment. Audrey said, “Whatever are you talking about, dear?”

Barney Meister cleared his throat. “Mrs. Case, we’ve uncovered evidence that the items indicating the presence of the cat burglar the other night were deliberately planted. I’ll have to ask you to come downtown with me.”

Betty merely stared at him.

George Reed said loudly, “Wait a minute, Chief. How do you explain the cut screen?”

“That only makes the case stronger, Mr. Reed. Microscopic examination showed it was cut from the inside.”

The banker’s mouth opened and closed several times like that of a fish kissing the side of a bowl. Eventually he abandoned whatever it was he had intended to say and turned toward Betty.

“What’s the name of that fellow who was Bruce’s law partner?” he asked.

“You mean Henry Quillan?”

“That’s it. You remember Bruce’s office number?”

“Of course. Miller 4-3200.”

“Miller 4-3200,” Reed repeated, fixing the number in his mind. “I’ll have Quillan down at headquarters before you get there. Meantime, don’t say a word.”

“This is ridiculous,” Betty said. “Chief Meister, are you accusing me of murder?”

“I’m arresting you on suspicion of homicide, Mrs. Case. Your uncle is right that you don’t have to say anything without legal counsel, but you do have to come along with me.”

Audrey Reed said, “You must be mad, Chief. My niece is no murderess.” She turned to her husband. “Never mind Henry Quillan, George. Get on the phone to our own lawyer in Rochester and ask him to arrange for the best criminal lawyer in the state.”

Rising to her feet, Betty said with a strained smile, “If you don’t mind, I prefer Henry Quillan. Will I need to pack a bag, Chief?”

Marshall said huskily, “If they hold you, I’ll bring you what you need. Where’s Bud?”

“Over at a neighbor boy’s. He’ll be all right. Aunt Audrey and Uncle George will be here. I’m quite ready to go.”

Picking up her handbag from an end table, she moved toward the front door. Marshall reached it first to hold it open for her. He let the chief go out immediately after her. As he pulled the door closed from outside, he could hear the sound of George Reed dialing the phone.

Outdoors, Chief Meister had Marshall wait in the car with Betty while he returned to the garage for the coil of rope.

Tossing it in the back seat of the car, he said laconically, “Evidence.”

As Henry Quillan’s law office was only half a block from police headquarters, the lawyer was already there when Meister, Marshall and Betty arrived. He was a tall, bony man of about fifty with a gaunt, Lincolnesque face and a rather dignified manner. He listened quietly to the chief’s explanation of Betty’s arrest.

“Any objection to my speaking to my client in private before you book her?” he asked.

A felony suspect had no legal right to confer with anyone without a police officer being present before even being booked, but the Runyon City police force inclined to be informal about such matters.

“All right with me,” the chief said with a shrug. “You can use my office.”

“May Kirk sit in with us?” Betty asked the lawyer.

He also shrugged. “If you want it that way.”

Inside the office Henry Quillan seated his bony frame on a corner of the desk and waved Betty and Marshall to chairs.

When they were seated, he said, “Now — first I have to know how you want to plead to this charge, Betty. Innocent or guilty?”

Marshall said indignantly, “She’s innocent, of course.”

Quillan gave him a brief glance. “Suppose we let her answer.”

“Innocent, Henry,” she said in a steady voice.

“All right. Now — that rope hasn’t yet been examined by the state police crime lab, and it may well turn out that the cuts don’t match after all. You can’t accurately judge a thing like that with the naked eye. But I know Harold Farroway’s work, and if he says that screen was cut from the inside, it was and he’ll be able to prove it in court. Do you have any theory as to how and why it was cut from inside?”

Betty gave her head a bewildered shake.

Marshall said, “Maybe the cat burglar got in some other way and only used the second-floor hall window as an escape route.”

Betty smiled at him. “I appreciate your faith, Kirk, but he could have unlocked it from inside. All you have to do is release a hook and swing it outward.”

Quillan said, “Frankly, it looks bad for you, Betty. And it’s going to look worse if Farroway establishes the fact that the rope fragment actually did come from the coil in the garage. We’d be better off with no evidence that the cat burglar attempted to break in that night. Just your word that you heard noises on the roof probably would be enough to establish reasonable doubt. But a jury is going to accept this apparently rigged evidence as an indication that you tried to cover up deliberate murder.”

“Don’t you want to defend me?” she asked quietly.

“Don’t turn temperamental,” he said with a touch of impatience. “As a lawyer I have to accept your word that you’re innocent. As a friend, I believe you are. But I have to convince a jury of it. I have no intention of sparing your feelings by avoiding unpleasant questions, because I’m going to have to furnish a jury with the answers. We have to find some reasonable explanation for that rope and screen.”

“I’m sorry,” she said contritely. “But I’m afraid I have no reasonable explanation. I did hear someone on the roof that night. I did hear a rasping noise from the direction of the hall window. I was convinced it was the cat burglar who eased open my bedroom door. What more can I say?”

“There’s the matter of motive,” Marshall put in. “How’s the state going to establish one? If she wanted to get rid of Bruce it would have been much simpler to divorce him.”

Quillan pursed his lips. “You have a point there. What was the financial setup between you and Bruce, Betty?”

“I’m afraid I controlled the purse strings. Bruce had his income from the law firm, of course, but he spent it pretty much as he pleased. The house and Dad and Mother’s estates were in my name. You might say I supported the family and Bruce’s income was his personal pocket money.”

The lawyer hiked his eyebrows. “As his law partner, I happen to know he took around seven thousand a year from the firm. That isn’t much as established lawyers’ incomes go, because he really didn’t work any harder than he had to. But it’s a considerable amount of pocket money. That’s beside the point, however. You retained everything you inherited in your own name? You hadn’t signed anything over to him or established joint bank accounts?”

Betty shook her head. “Everything was in my own name.”

“Hmm. New York has no community property law, and it wouldn’t apply here anyway, because only property increases subsequent to the marriage are involved in community property settlements. He couldn’t have had any legal claim against you if you had decided to divorce him. It could be a telling point if we show the jury that divorce would have caused you no financial disadvantage.”

“I was going to divorce him,” she said.

The lawyer gave her a sharp look.

“You’re not supposed to conceal anything at all from your lawyer, are you?” she asked. “Bruce and I were through. We hadn’t been sleeping together for weeks. I don’t suppose the reasons are important now, but I had definitely made up my mind. To divorce him, not to kill him. As Kirk pointed out, there was no reason to kill him even if the thought had occurred to me.”

Quillan said, “I suggest we keep your divorce plans between the three of us for the moment. They wouldn’t gain you any sympathy from the jury. I also suggest you refuse to make a statement of any sort to the police, except through me. Okay?”

“I’ll do whatever you say, Henry.”

The lawyer came to his feet. “Then let’s go out and get the ordeal over with. I’ll try to get you released on bail, but don’t count on it. If they plan to charge first-degree, you can’t be released on bail.”