We All Killed Grandma (16 page)

Maybe there wasn’t any answer, I thought, except time. Maybe in time I’d even get over wanting Robin.

Maybe someday I’d be able to love someone else, to get married again if I could find someone whom I could love
who didn’t want children. Maybe Vangy. Vangy didn’t seem like even an incipiently maternal type.

I went to bed and lay there alone and very damned aware that I was alone. The clock ticked. The window curtain rustled as a breeze blew it. At long intervals a car went by on the street and once I heard the distant banshee wail of a squad car’s siren.

And after a while I gave up; I got up and turned on the light to read a while. There was no deadline for me for tomorrow so no reason why I had to try to force myself to sleep.

There weren’t any books around; I made a mental note to have my bookcase and books sent around from the warehouse to which they’d gone when Robin and I were breaking up. And I’d read the magazines on my end table that stood by the comfortable chair. But I remembered that there’d been some old magazines in a suitcase in the closet; I’d come across them a few days ago when it had occurred to me to take a casual inventory of what possessions I might have around the apartment that I hadn’t discovered or used yet.

I opened the closet door and slid the suitcase, which was lying flat on the floor, out into the light and opened it. There were ten or twelve magazines lying in two piles in the bottom of it. Mostly women’s magazines—
Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, McCalls
—so I’d probably bought them to study the advertising techniques or maybe because they contained ads I’d done myself and wanted clippings of. But I’d find some readable fiction in some of them.

I carried the first pile of them over to the top of the other pile and then lifted them all at once. But I didn’t get up from the kneeling position I was in. I put the pile of magazines down on the floor carefully and looked, without believing, at what had been under them on the bottom of the suitcase.

It was a black automatic pistol.

I didn’t touch it.

After a while I got up off my knees and went to the telephone. I called the homicide department and asked for Walter Smith. He was out but expected back shortly;
I left word to have him call me. I didn’t want another detective, one I’d have to do a lot of explaining to.

I sat down in the overstuffed chair and waited for the phone to ring. I didn’t try to read; I knew I wouldn’t be able to make sense out of a single sentence.

After several years the phone rang. It was Walter. I said, “Will you come around right away?”

I could hear him sigh. “Rod, can’t it wait? We’re awfully busy tonight. And you’ve probably worked yourself into a tizzy over nothing.”

I said, “This is important. It’s something new. If you want, I’ll come down there.”

“All right, if it’s that important I’ll run around for a few minutes. Got to finish one report first but I’ll be there in half an hour or so.”

I said, “Thanks, Walter.”

I sat down to wait another several years and then decided I might as well get dressed. I’d probably be going down to headquarters with Walter, anyway. He’d have to have a ballistics expert check it to see if it was Grandma’s gun, the one that had killed her. He’d want me with him until he knew that.

Anyway, dressing would give me something to do to make the time go faster.

I dressed. I killed some more time by plugging in my electric razor and shaving.

Then I turned on the bright overhead lights and went over to look at the gun again, this time as closely as I could without touching it. I’m far from being an expert on guns, but I knew it was an automatic and thought it was a thirty-two caliber one. It wasn’t big enough to be a forty-five, anyway. The lettering on the grip said it was a Colt, but that didn’t mean anything to me because I didn’t know what make Grandma’s gun had been.

I sat down again to wait for Walter.

If the gun in that suitcase was Grandma’s it didn’t prove that I’d killed her, of course. But it would prove definitely and beyond a doubt that her murder had not been at the hands of an ordinary burglar performing an ordinary burglary. If the murder gun was now in my apartment it meant either that I was the killer or that the killer had planted
the gun here to make me or the police think I’d killed her. An ordinary burglar would have had no conceivable reason to take the risk of bringing the gun here.

But if I had killed her, it eliminated one of the two times when I might have done it. If I were the killer then the medical examiner must have been wrong by about an hour one way or the other, since he set the time at eleven thirty and Walter Smith had seen me downtown within minutes of that time. But if I’d killed her around midnight, then I couldn’t possibly have had time to come home, leave the gun, and get back there to make the phone call a few minutes after midnight.

I could, just barely, have killed her at eleven, gone home and left the gun and got downtown by the time Walter saw me there.

But had I? No matter how crazy I might have been my thoughts must have followed some pattern. What method in madness could have made me, after killing her, go home to leave the gun, go downtown where I was seen by Walter, then go back to the scene of the crime and telephone the police to report it?

Suddenly and for the first time in eight days I began to see how ridiculous it had been for me to consider myself, even possibly, a murderer. Not that I’d ever really believed that I had; it was just that, until now, I hadn’t been able to discount the possibility, no matter how thoroughly other people were convinced that I could not have done it.

But strangely it didn’t make me feel any better, any happier, to feel that way about it.

I looked at my watch for what may have been the hundredth time. It was twenty-five after three. A little better than an hour since I’d called Walter; a little better than half an hour since he’d called me back.

Then I heard footsteps along the corridor outside and went to open the door.

H
E
came in casually, saying, “Hi, Rod. What’s on your mind?” But he was past me before I could answer and was standing there looking down at the open suitcase with the pile of magazines beside it and the pistol lying in it. He said, “Oh, Lord. You came across that and thought you’d found the murder weapon! Wish you’d told me over the phone; I could have saved a trip here.”

He dropped into a chair. I stood staring at him. “What do you mean, Walter?”

“That gun’s yours. Used to be mine; I sold it to you.”

I crossed to the easy chair and sat down. “Why would I have bought a gun from you? I don’t get it. I hate guns.”

“About a year—no, a year and a half ago. There was a little crime wave out on the east side, your neighborhood. Several burglaries, several robberies, one within a block of your apartment.

“You came in to see me one day—I was working days then—and told me your wife, Robin, had been heckling you to get a gun to keep in the apartment, that you didn’t want one but you’d have to get one to keep peace in the family. You wanted to know if you needed a permit—I told you you didn’t as long as you didn’t carry the gun, just kept it on your own premises. Then you asked me if I knew where you could pick up a used one—and you said you didn’t care whether it would shoot or not because you didn’t expect to use it. You said if a burglar or robber did get in your place you and Robin would be a lot safer if you weren’t armed than if you were. And that even with the little crime wave going on there was only one chance in thousands of your apartment being picked—but that if it’d make your wife happier to think there was a loaded gun around you were willing to play along.”

“You mean the gun isn’t loaded now?”

“You didn’t even have any bullets for it. I offered you some but you wouldn’t take them. That gun shoots all
right, but it jams once in a while. I’d had it to two gunsmiths but they couldn’t fix it so it wouldn’t jam maybe once out of a dozen rounds. So I sold it to you cheap, for fifteen bucks; I’d already bought myself a revolver and was carrying that. The automatic was just kicking around in my desk doing me no good.”

“It’s a thirty-two, isn’t it? The same kind as Grandma’s?”

“Yeah. And come to think of it, they’re both Colts. I’ll make sure.” He got up and started for the suitcase.

I said, “Don’t touch it till you
are
sure. I haven’t touched it—that’s why I asked you to come here instead of bringing it in. And if it
is
Grandma’s gun—”

He grunted and bent over the suitcase, a pencil in his hand. He picked up the gun by putting the pencil in the barrel and turned it around to look at what had been the under side.

“That little chip out of the handle—yeah, this is it.” He took hold of the gun by the handle and put the pencil back into his pocket. He slid out the clip and then pulled back the slide and locked it in the open position. He brought it over under the light and squinted into the barrel and then grunted again. “Full of dust and dirt. Hell of a way to take care of a gun. And the slide’s dirty too. This gun hasn’t had a cartridge in it since I sold it to you, let alone been fired. Now you satisfied?”

“Yes. Thanks a lot. Sorry I bothered you but I’m glad you came around. I was feeling lousy even before I found that gun, and it gave me a bad hour. Can I give you a drink?”

“No thanks. On duty. But you look as though one wouldn’t hurt you any, so go ahead.”

I decided he was right; what I’d drunk early in the evening was completely gone now. I was cold sober and a little shaky; one drink would do me more good than harm. I started to make one for myself.

Walter watched me. He asked, “Still got a sneaking suspicion somewhere that you’re a murderer? Or did this cure you?”

“I guess this cured me,” I told him.

“Quit even guessing. Listen, this gun isn’t doing you
any good now. Want me to take it along and sell it for you? One of the boys might want it for a spare or to use on the target range. For practice shooting it doesn’t matter if a gun jams once in a while. I can probably get you your fifteen bucks back.”

“A deal,” I said. “Sell it for whatever you can get. On the condition that we spend the proceeds together when you have a night off. One thing puzzles me a little, Walter. Why would I have taken that gun along when I left—the apartment. I wouldn’t have wanted it.”

“That’s an easy guess. Your wife thought all along you were keeping it loaded. If you’d given it to her instead of taking it you’d have had to explain it wasn’t loaded and that you didn’t even have any bullets for it. Maybe that would have been a little embarrassing, especially if you wanted to stay on friendly terms with her and if she already had a down on you for other things.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “Walter, you ought to be a detective.”

He got up. “Just what I was thinking. I’d better get back down to the office and at least pretend to be one. So long—and quit worrying yourself to a frazzle.”

When he’d left I sat down with my drink. And thought about how sensible he was and how right he was. When I found the answers to the few things that still puzzled me about the night of the murder, they’d turn out to be as simple as the explanation of why I’d found a gun in my closet. The time from ten o’clock to eleven-thirty was easily enough accounted for; I’d been somewhere doing some solitary and moderately heavy drinking after leaving Vangy. If I never found or remembered the exact place where I’d done that drinking, what did it matter?

And if I ever remembered what it was, there’d be some simple and logical explanation of why I headed for Grandma’s after eleven-thirty. Probably to see Arch; I might or might not have known that he was in Chicago and if I had known it I might have forgotten the fact, in my cups. There didn’t even have to be anything I wanted to see him
about
. Maybe I’d simply been maudlinly lonely and wanted to talk to somebody, anybody, even Arch. And half past eleven isn’t a time when you go calling on people—
unless you know, as I must have known about Arch, that they seldom turn in before one or two o’clock in the morning anyway.

I thought a while, wondering what I was wondering about, and then undressed again and got back into bed. I slept, finally, my eyes closed against the gray light of dawn that came in the windows.

When I woke it was almost noon and the windows were still or again gray; there was a drizzling rain. This was my last day before returning to work. And half gone already.

I killed the other half by going to the public library and skimming through the few recent books they had on advertising copy writing. It sounded simple and familiar; I felt I wasn’t going to have any trouble getting back into the swing of my job.

It was five o’clock when I left the library and I called Pete Radik to see if he could eat dinner with me. He was apologetic as hell because he couldn’t.

“Damn it, Rod, I wish I could but this other date is important. And I’d ask you along but we’re going to talk business and you’d be bored stiff.”

“That’s all right, Pete. Some other time.”

“It’s a publisher’s representative from New York on a field trip. I’m working on a book, psychology of course. He read my opening chapters in his hotel room last night and we set up the dinner date tonight to talk them over. I don’t even know yet whether he likes them or not. And here’s why it’s important—if he’s at all enthusiastic I want to try to talk him into an advance on the book. It’ll let me work on the book full time all summer if I can get one, even a couple of hundred bucks. Otherwise I’ll be taking over some summer-term classes and will have to keep plugging on it evenings only. I can maybe finish the book if I have the whole summer free.”

I said, “I can lend you a couple of hundred, Pete, if you don’t get the advance. I’m starting back to work tomorrow so I won’t even have to draw against the estate to do it.”

“Thanks, but no. I don’t want to go into debt just to get the summer off. An advance would be different; I
wouldn’t have to pay that back. It’d come out of the proceeds of the book—and besides it would mean practical certainty that the book was going to be accepted when I finished it. But thanks a lot for offering it. And to a guy you’ve seen only once in your life, as far as you can remember. Or are you beginning to remember any little things?”