We All Killed Grandma (11 page)

“Lay off the Lieutenant, Rod. You called me Walter. Sure, I’ll drop around. Let’s see, it’s eight o’clock. I’ll be there by nine. Okay?”

I told him it was okay.

I made myself another drink and the whisky was getting
low. I didn’t know whether Walter Smith would drink with me or not, just before going on duty, but I wanted to have plenty on hand in case. I went down and got another bottle.

It was a warm muggy night, with flashes of heat lightning in the distance. An unusually warm night for May? even late May. If this was a fair sample, it was going to be a hell of a summer.

I didn’t like it outside, in the hot, flashing night. I was glad to get back to my room and finish the cool drink I’d made.

The hands of my watch crawled to nine o’clock and then past it, and at five minutes after there was a knock on the door.

H
E WAS
slightly under medium height and on the chubby side. He didn’t look like a detective, but good detectives aren’t supposed to. And I hoped that he was a good detective because he didn’t think I was a killer. Or did he? Could he be giving me rope to hang myself? No, hardly that or he’d have hung around more; I wouldn’t have had to call him.

“Drink?” I asked him.

“Well—one. No more.” He looked at me closely. “You’ve been hitting the stuff pretty hard yourself, haven’t you, Rod?”

“Guess I have. Feeling low.” I made us two drinks. Handed him his.

“All right,” he said, “what’s on your mind?”

“Maybe you can straighten me out on some things, Walter. Let’s start at the beginning. How well did I know you? Where did we meet? That sort of stuff.”

“Friends, but not close friends. We met—let’s see—about six years ago. You were just back from college. You had your first job, in the circulation department of the
Chronicle
, and you’d just moved away from Grandma
Tuttle’s and had taken a room of your own—in a rooming house my mother ran. I was about the same age as you—a year older, I think—and still a rookie on the police force. My room was next to yours and we got to be friends, used to play cards some, once in a while went out on double dates together, even shot a bit of pool and bowled once in a while.

“You stayed there a year or so and then moved away—up in the world, I guess—you were making more money and took a bachelor apartment instead of just a furnished room. We kept on seeing each other for a while, and then it got less and less frequent. Lately it’s been only when we happened to run into one another accidentally. Last time I saw you—before Monday night—was a month or so ago, on the street. We talked a few minutes and you suggested we drop in somewhere for a drink or a cup of coffee, but I didn’t have time.”

“Did you know Robin?”

“Met her one night, that’s all. I came into a restaurant—Ricci’s—to eat and you and Robin were at a table and had just ordered. You introduced us and asked me to sit at your table and I did. That’s the only time I ever saw her. Nice-looking girl. I’m married too, by the way, and you met my wife once under fairly similar circumstances, only it was my night off and a tavern instead of a restaurant. I’ve been married four years, got a kid two and a half. Well, I guess that gives you the picture of how well we knew one another. Pretty well for a year or so and then—well, you know how things like that happen, people drift apart.” He grinned reminiscently. “You used to be nuts about cars, back then. Had a hot rod, a Model A that you spent most of your money on and loved like a brother.”

“Guess I’ve still got a touch of it,” I said. “Picked up a ticket today for speeding.”

“Want me to fix it for you?”

I shook my head. “Let me pay the fine and teach myself a lesson.”

He laughed. “Knew you were going to say that. I’ve offered three or four times to fix tickets for you, and you always insisted on taking your medicine. Well, what did you want to talk about?”

“About the murder. Anything new on it?”

He shook his head gloomily. “And this isn’t for publication, but I doubt if we ever will. We’ve picked up every known burglar in town and questioned the hell out of them, and haven’t got any reason to suspect one more than another, except that we could eliminate a few who had pretty solid alibis. Must have been an out-of-towner, or somebody new to the game we don’t know yet. And if we do ever pick him up, how the hell would we prove a case against him?”

“Ballistics?” I asked: “I mean if he kept the gun he shot her with—”

“We can hardly hope he’d be that stupid, but of course it’s an outside chance. And outside of that, what could we get on him? There were securities in the safe—some of them negotiable—but presumably he took only the cash, and it wasn’t marked. And he either wore gloves or was damn careful in wiping out his prints. We’re pretty sure it was gloves. We lifted every print in or around the room and they’re mostly Mrs. Tuttle’s, some of Mrs. Trent’s, a few that are Arch’s. And yours on the outside doorknob and the telephone. Not even any footprints outside; the ground was too hard. We found scuff marks in a clump of bushes about ten feet from the window, but no clear prints. He must have hid there, watching the window, until he saw her leave the room, then he upped with his knife and cut the screen and went in.”

“Don’t you think that shows he knew her habits?”

“Possibly, not necessarily. If he’d cased the job, it wouldn’t have been too hard for him to find out. And a lot of people knew Mrs. Tuttle’s working habits—she was something of a local celebrity, Rod, as an elderly, eccentric woman in business. She’s been written up in news stories, feature articles, in both the daily papers here. She must have liked it, thought publicity was good for business, because she was always willing to talk to a reporter or a feature writer. Matter of fact, that gives me an idea.”

“What?”

“Got to ask Mrs. Trent if any reporters called on Mrs. Tuttle recently. If the burglar did case the job—if it wasn’t a random prowl—that’d have been the simplest way for
him to find out things. He could have pretended to be a reporter—and probably have been invited right into the room he wanted to case and could have asked her all the questions he wanted. And if Mrs. Trent let him in, she might be able to give us a description. That’d help.”

“One thing I don’t see,” I said, “and that’s how, from outside, he could have known she’d leave the safe open when she left the room. And the safe’s against the outer wall; he couldn’t see it from outside. And it seems to me unlikely she’d have it standing open all evening every evening.”

“You can see it, though; there’s a mirror. You have to step close to the window, but you can see the safe in that mirror—the one on the wall near the door. He couldn’t see it from where he crouched in the bushes waiting, but the minute he saw her leave the room—and he could see the doorway all right from where he hid—all he had to do was step to the window and look through it into the mirror to see if the safe was standing open.”

“And if it hadn’t been?”

“How would I know? Maybe he’d wait till another night; maybe he’d watched her several times before, waiting for the safe to be open at the time she went for her glass of hot milk. Or maybe he figured to do the job anyway, whether the safe was open or not. He could have taken advantage of her leaving the room to get inside; he could have waited by the inner door for her to come back, have slugged or overcome her and tied her up and then taken his time about getting into the safe, one way or another. Maybe by making her give him the combination under threat of killing her. Or if he really knew his business as a burglar, he wouldn’t have had to do that; a good man could have got that safe open in fifteen minutes, and he’d have had as much time as he needed.”

“But he killed her. Why didn’t he just slug her? You say that’s what he would have done if she’d left the safe closed. Walter, I think she knew him. And that’s why I don’t believe it was a burglar.”

He frowned. “This is all guesswork, but I’ll reconstruct it for you—the way I see it. It goes fairly well whether he cased the job or not. He sees Mrs. Tuttle leave the room,
goes in as soon as he can cut the screen. He goes first to the desk and looks quickly in the drawers—”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, I’ll have to tell you one little thing we kept out of the papers. The gun she was shot with was her own gun; she kept it in the top drawer of her desk. A thirty-two automatic. We kept that fact out of the paper just on the off-chance that if the burglar didn’t know we knew the gun was missing he might keep it—or even try to sell it. Just an off-chance, but nothing to lose.

“But back to the reconstruction—he goes through the desk first, at least the top drawer of it, and snags onto the gun. Then he goes to the safe and is taking the money out of it when Mrs. Tuttle returns. She sees him and he shoots, first shot wild and second into her forehead.”

He held up a hand. “Now don’t ask me why he didn’t just step across the room and kayo her instead. It doesn’t mean she
knew
him. It just means she’d had a good look at him and could identify him. For that reason he decides he has to kill her, and shoots.”

“But why, especially if he was wearing gloves, would he have taken the gun away with him? Why not just drop it, once he’d used it for killing?”

“Probably panicky, a gun makes a hell of a lot of noise inside a room. Likely he pictured the whole neighborhood waked up and a beat cop running toward the house. He’d want to keep that gun till he was clear of the neighborhood in case he had to use it again. But if he’s smart, damn it, he got rid of the gun as soon as he was in the clear.”

My glass was empty; I saw that Smith was sipping at his slowly, only an inch or so gone. I made myself another drink. And did some thinking.

I said, “You seem awfully sure about it being Grandma’s gun she was shot with. Any reason for being sure, except that it was the right caliber and you didn’t find it?”

“We’re sure. We had a bullet fired from it for comparison. Fired ten years ago, but that doesn’t matter; it had probably never been fired since and the lands and grooves in the barrel hadn’t changed.”

I took a swallow of my drink. “How the devil did you find a bullet fired from it ten years ago?”

“It was still in the wall, behind the mirror.” He grinned. “Your brother fired it, accidentally. One day shortly after Mrs. Tuttle bought the gun to keep in her desk, Arch was fooling with it and it went off. It had almost a hair trigger, he told me; he was just barely touching the trigger when it fired. The bullet went into the wall. He said Mrs. Tuttle bawled the hell out of him but never went to the expense of having the plaster patched. She just hung a mirror over it. Anyway, we dug out the old bullet and it matched the two that were fired Monday night. So we’re not guessing about what gun was used.”

Arch hadn’t told me about that, but then again I hadn’t asked him.

Smith said, “So that’s that. And what’s wrong with it as a reconstruction of the crime?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Not a thing, except that I don’t believe it.”

He put down his glass, still half full, and turned around to face me squarely. He said, “Rod, you’re crazy. You’ve been seeing too many mysteries on television or in the movies or something. In real life, the simple explanation is the right one. And most murders are done by professional criminals, not amateurs leaving a string of false clues. Or—wait a minute, do you know anything about this that I don’t know? Or have you remembered anything?”

“I haven’t remembered anything. And no, I don’t know anything about it except what you’ve told me.” There was, of course, the expression on Robin’s face last night, but I wasn’t going to bring Robin into this. And besides, I hadn’t believed it was a simple burglary with murder incidental even before last night.

“Then what are you going on?”

“A feeling, I guess. A hunch. Only it might be more in this case because it might be something I know or remember in my subconscious mind and that my conscious mind has forgotten as part of the amnesia.”

“Then why don’t you go to a psychiatrist, like Arch has been wanting you to?”

“I don’t know, Walter. All I know is that I
won’t,
I
can’t.
And I don’t think it’s because I might find out that I did the murder myself. I think if I knew I’d done a psychopathic killing, I’d want to give myself up. I don’t know why it is. Call it an unreasoning phobia against psychiatric treatment, call it anything. Maybe just plain damn stubbornness.”

“All right, it’s your business whether you want treatment for your amnesia or not. Nobody can force it on you as long as you’re sane otherwise. But about the murder. I hate to see you working yourself into a tizzy—and you are—over nothing. Listen. We’ve checked every other angle, every other possibility, forty ways for Sunday. Mrs. Tuttle’s accounts and papers are in perfect order and have been checked by accountants. The only man who was in any possible position to be robbing her is Hennig, and he wasn’t. And he’s got lots more money than she had, anyway. It’s true she didn’t have many friends, but she didn’t have any serious enemies either that we’ve been able to find. She was a pretty shrewd dealer and implacable in getting anything she had coming, so a lot of people disliked her—but none to the point of murder.

“So who does that leave? You and Arch are the only ones who benefited by her death. Arch was in Chicago—and don’t think we didn’t check that thoroughly. But—well, let’s grant that he could have hired an assassin to kill her, and to make it look like a burglary, at a time when he was out of town.”

“I’d never even thought of that. But he wouldn’t; Arch is no killer.”

“There are better arguments than that why he wouldn’t have. One, he’d be placing himself in the hired killer’s hands, susceptible to blackmail all the rest of his life. Regardless of Arch’s morals, he’s too smart a boy for that. Second, he wasn’t under any pressure for money; he knew he was going to get that inheritance soon anyway. Did he—or anybody—happen to tell you about Mrs. Tuttle’s heart condition?”

“No. What do you mean?”

“That she didn’t have very long to live anyway. Her heart was bad and getting worse. Doc Eggleston, your
family doctor, told me she might have died of coronary thrombosis any minute—or maybe lived a year or two but not likely much longer than that. With his inheritance coming that soon, Arch wouldn’t have put his head in a noose by committing murder. Neither would you, for that matter, if you nurse any wild idea you might have killed your grandmother for money. You knew about her heart condition too. Probably why nobody thought to mention it to you, and it couldn’t have been a factor in her being murdered, any way that you look at it.”