We All Killed Grandma (12 page)

“I never thought that I—”

“Wait, we’re finishing with Arch first. There’s still one possibility; he might have had adequate motive for killing her—or hiring her killed—if for any reason she was turning against him, if he had cause to think she might disinherit him. Let’s face it that Arch loves money, even if he hates to work for it. But luckily we happen to know that Arch wasn’t in the doghouse; he was still the apple of Grandma’s eye. She was in Hennig’s office the very day of the murder, on minor and irrelevant business, and they chatted a while and Hennig says she mentioned—he forgets in what connection—that she was increasing Arch’s allowance. Probably just on account of rising prices, but it shows he was still in her good graces or she wouldn’t have done that, prices or no. And she still had strong faith in him as a writer. God knows why.”

“Maybe she read his plays and liked them.”

“Whatever the cause, Arch was her one weakness. We can rule out Arch. Along with everybody else, including you. Which gets us back to the burglar, which is where we belong. Maybe you don’t realize one thing, incidentally; there really are burglars, you know. And sometimes when surprised in the act of burglary, they really do kill people. Come down to headquarters sometime and I’ll show you records of cases right in this very city and within recent years.”

I said, “That takes care of Arch. And plenty well, although it never even occurred to me to suspect him. Now take care of me as well, if you can. Wait a minute, I’ll admit I had no sane or logical motive and from what I know of myself wouldn’t have killed anybody even if I
had a sane and logical motive. But I was drunk. For all I know maybe I was suddenly off my rocker. The fact that I went into shock and amnesia because I found a body doesn’t make me look too mentally stable. Anyway, ignore my apparent absence of motive and stick to the facts. Have you been able to find out where I was or what I was doing before you saw me downtown around eleven-thirty?”

“No, and I don’t give much of a damn what you were doing because I did see you there and then—and spoke to you—and I’m convinced Mrs. Tuttle died at just about that time.”

“That’s one thing I want to ask you. I’ve never studied forensic medicine—or at least I don’t think I have—but I have the impression that no medical examiner is going to be sure within half an hour of how long a body has been dead. So why couldn’t Grandma have been killed at eleven o’clock or at twelve o’clock—and in either case I could have had opportunity.”

He sighed patiently. “All right, the M. E. could have been off half an hour, but it’s pretty unlikely he’d be that far off since he saw her as soon as he did and estimated an hour. That’d be a 50 percent variation, but I’d buy it except for the other facts. Henderson’s hearing one of the shots—and it’s not too strange he didn’t hear both; a passing car might have been gunning its engine or something just at the time of one of them. Or, more likely, he did hear both, but the first one didn’t penetrate his awareness; the second one did. Things like that happen; I’ve come across them. But even more important than that is the regularity of Mrs. Tuttle’s habits. You could set your watch by her, and eleven-thirty was her time for that glass of warm milk and she was coming back through the door with it when she died. And the autopsy showed, incidentally, that she’d taken a sip of milk—one sip—just about one minute before she died. Probably in the kitchen, sampling it to see if it was the right temperature. And—I don’t know how the reporters missed this but they didn’t mention it in the news stories so I don’t know whether you know it or not, but her wrist watch broke when she fell and the hands are at eleven-thirty-three.”

He finished the last of his drink and put down the glass.
He said, “All right, you’re thinking that watches can be set to any given time after they’ve stopped. And that women’s wrist watches are notoriously inaccurate. But damn it, Rod, don’t look at any one of those points; look at all of them added together. Mrs. Tuttle died within minutes of half past eleven, and if you killed her then I must be your accomplice to give you the alibi I do give you. I’m sure what time it was when I saw you and you couldn’t have got there more than a few minutes sooner than you did and—oh, hell, just because you can’t remember what
did
happen quit reaching for impossibilities so you can assume the worst thing you can think of. You didn’t kill her; you couldn’t have.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s forget it, and thanks. One more drink?”

“Well—I’m not on duty for two and a half hours yet and I don’t feel that first one. Guess I can stand one more.”

I made one for each of us. Definitely I was beginning to feel the drinks I’d had, and probably that was to the good. I hadn’t thought about Robin for minutes, and I hadn’t been wondering where she was and what she was doing.

And I thought I’d be able to sleep when Walter Smith left.

All right, I was thinking, then I hadn’t killed Grandma. Walter had probably put his finger on part of it when he’d said that just because I couldn’t remember what really had happened, I was trying to convince myself of the worst. Just because I had amnesia, from an obvious cause, that didn’t have to mean I was psychopathic.

And then I told myself—but there’s something. If there wasn’t something that I’d known before my amnesia and which my subconscious mind didn’t want me to know, why was I morbidly afraid of psychoanalysis in general, hypnotism in particular?

I knew something I didn’t want to know. Amnesia was my defense against myself. And if I broke it down, if I remembered—

Glass in hand, I went to the window and stood staring down into the lighted street. Behind me, Walter said, “What’s eating you, Rod?”

“I wish I knew,” I told him.

“Well, if it will help you straighten yourself out, I sure hope we get that burglar—and send him to the chair.”

I said, “I suppose I hope you get him—he may kill again if you don’t. But I don’t wish him the chair. I’d settle for a sentence.”

“Why, in God’s name? Unless you don’t believe in capital punishment at all.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t believe in any form of violent death or inflicting unnecessary pain.”

He grinned. “Rod, I’d forgotten that about you. You were the boy who wouldn’t go hunting or fishing because you didn’t like to hurt or kill animals. Say—do you follow through on that? Maybe I didn’t think to ask you back then, but why aren’t you a vegetarian if you don’t like animals killed? Or are you one by now?”

“No, I’m not a vegetarian. I accept that we’re carnivorous and that animals have to die so we can eat. But I don’t believe we have to
enjoy
killing. I’ll admit we have to kill other creatures in order to survive. Even if we were all vegetarians, we’d have to do that to keep the animal—not to mention the insect—populations down. We’d be crowded off the earth and out of our own homes if we didn’t kill.” I found myself pacing up and down the room, empty glass in my hand. I said, “What I object to in hunting—or even fishing—is that men take
pleasure
in killing, make a sport of it. If a man hunts or fishes to eat, to survive, all right. We all had to do that once, back when we were living in caves and trees. A man got a kick out of killing then because making a kill meant food for him. And because he was still a savage anyway.

“Don’t give me the line that modern man hunts for food. He doesn’t, not people like us anyway. One hunter out of a thousand gets enough game to pay for the time he spends, not to mention what he’s paid for equipment to hunt with. It’s because the human race has a hangover from savagery—a hangover in red.”

“But damn it, Rod, hunting serves a purpose. You yourself admit animal populations have to be kept down so we can survive. If deer, for instance, weren’t checked, they’d ruin every bit of woodland by overbrowsing it, and then
starve to death and die anyway. Some of them have to be killed each year.”

“Sure, but it doesn’t have to be done for pleasure. It could be done—and more easily and effectively—by a few professional hunters hired by the state. Men who were real marksmen and could kill an animal painlessly with one shot. Maybe even some painless poison could be used. My point is that killing, even necessary killing, is an unpleasant duty. Like—well, like garbage collecting. That’s got to be done too, but it’s done by men who do it for a living and not for pleasure. If you ran into a man who spent his vacation collecting garbage for the fun of it you’d think he was perverted, and you’d be right. But he wouldn’t be a tenth as perverted as a man who goes out and spends his vacation killing animals—and too damn often not doing a good job of it and letting them get away wounded to suffer and die horribly—for enjoyment.”

Walter put down his glass and stood up.

“Got to go,” he said. “Got to eat before I report in. How’s about having something to eat with me?”

“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t want to eat.” I hadn’t eaten since noon, but I wasn’t hungry.

“Okay. Be seeing you. And I’ll let you know if we make any progress—even if you’re too soft-hearted to want the killer fried.”

At the door he turned back. “Thanks for the lecture,” he said. “And damn your hide for it. I’m on vacation week after next and have a hunting trip planned. I’m still going, but maybe I’ll enjoy it a little less than I did last year. So long.”

“So long,” I said. “And thanks a lot for coming up.”

When he’d left I made myself another drink and then sat trying to read because I didn’t want to think, but the type was hard to focus on and I gave up after a while when I realized that I’d just read a whole page without getting any sense out of it at all.

I walked across the room to go to the bathroom and noticed that I wasn’t walking quite straight. Not actually staggering but not quite on balance either. This must have been just about how drunk I was, I realized, a week ago tonight when I’d walked into Grandma’s house. Probably
a urinalysis would show about the same percentage of alcohol as it had that night when they’d given me one at the police station. But there wasn’t any urinalysis apparatus in my bathroom.

And I didn’t care how drunk I was, anyway, or how much drunker I got.

I
WOKE
up with a well-deserved hangover, but it wasn’t any particular color. It wasn’t even actively painful; I just felt dull and stupid and as though my head was stuffed with cotton. I showered and dressed and then went out for coffee, lots of hot black coffee. It took away some of the cotton but not all of it.

It was eleven by the time I got back to my room and it was getting hot already. Within an hour or two my room was going to be a hotbox again, and today was the day I really had to study the stuff I’d brought home from the office; today and tomorrow both, if I was going to be ready to go back to work Thursday. And it couldn’t wait till evening, because I was seeing Vangy this evening.

I decided that a beach was the answer. Not a sandy, crowded public beach—and particularly not the beach where I’d seen Robin yesterday. Just a quiet place where there’d be a breeze off the water, and trees for cool shade.

I took my brief case down to the car and started driving. Before I got out of town I stopped and bought a few sandwiches to take along, and I bought a couple of thermos bottles and had one filled with ice water and the other with hot coffee. I drove on out the river road and found the spot I was looking for. The afternoon went not too badly. I studied a while and dozed a while and then studied some more.

When the shadows of the trees began to stretch out over the lake I drove back home, showered again and dressed for the evening. The hangover was gone.

The address Vangy Wayne had given me was an apartment
house about like the one where Robin and I had lived—where Robin still lived—but on the other side of town.

I buzzed a bell button downstairs and caught the latch of the door. One flight up, so I walked. The door of the apartment was ajar so I went in and Vangy’s voice came from the next room, “Rod?”

“Rod,” I said.

“Not quite ready. Be with you in a few minutes.”

A few minutes would probably mean half an hour so I made myself comfortable on the sofa and picked up a magazine. But instead of looking at it, I looked around the room. It was a nice comfortable room, a little on the frilly side for my taste and the pictures were just pictures and there wasn’t any bookcase, just a magazine rack.

Had I ever been here before? Probably; Vangy had said I’d walked out on her. Whatever she meant by that. Of course that could have been from a tavern or from a party somewhere, but if it had been any place I’d taken her I doubted that I could have been so rude as to leave her there, for whatever reason.

So I must have been here. How often? And, by any chance, had I been here a week ago yesterday, the evening of the murder?

And what had my relations with Vangy been? Getting the answers to those questions came first, ahead of being briefed about the office and the people I’d again be working with.

Vangy’s voice, “Help yourself to a drink, Rod, while you’re waiting. Just a few more minutes.”

“Thanks, I’ll wait, Vangy,” I said. I’d already seen the decanter of whisky, the pitcher of water with ice cubes in it, the glasses, that she’d put out on the coffee table and had decided against it. I’d be drinking during the evening, no doubt, but the longer I waited before starting the better.

I tried to read the magazine a while and then Vangy’s voice again, “Ready in one second now, Roddy. Want to make us each a drink?”

Roddy, yet. I wondered if I’d ever liked to be called Roddy. I doubted it.

“Sure,” I said. I made the drinks and a minute later she came out of the other room. I stood up.

She looked like a million dollars in one small package. “Like it?” She pirouetted for me and I gathered that she was showing off the dress; it was a nice dress but I don’t know enough about women’s clothes to describe it.

“Beautiful.”

“Bought it today, took a long lunch hour. Just for you, Roddy.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said again. She needn’t have bought it for me; she probably didn’t realize that any dress she had, except the one she’d been wearing at work yesterday, would be a brand-new dress to me. Women could save a lot of money on clothes if their friends acquired amnesia oftener.