We All Killed Grandma Read online

  We All Killed Grandma

  FREDRIC BROWN

  We All Killed

  Grandma

  A DUTTON GUILT EDGED MYSTERY

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA), 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First e-book edition published by Dutton, July 2013

  Copyright © 1952 by Fredric Brown

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA REGISTRADA

  ISBN: 978-1-101-62255-1

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Editors’ Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  About the Author

  EDITORS’ NOTE

  From 1947 to 1956, Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries was a pulp imprint that published hard-boiled noir detective fiction. In those years, it published eighty-two titles, including novels by noir icon Mickey Spillane. In the summer of 2012, Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries was launched as a digital imprint, dedicated to discovering and publishing original crime short stories and novellas that capture the noir spirit in a fresh, modern way, as eBooks.

  We at DGE are thrilled that we have the opportunity to introduce new characters to the world. From journalists to private eyes to hit men to cops, both clean and crooked, we couldn’t be more proud of the colorful cast of characters solving the mysteries under our imprint—and of the wonderful authors who’ve penned them.

  But neither do we forget the characters and authors who came before. The original Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries was home to some incredible writers. From time to time, we will turn to our vintage DGE catalog to find a hidden gem we feel should be highlighted for a modern—and digital—audience.

  Fredric Brown (1906–72) was one of Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries’ original authors. A writer of mysteries, science fiction, and more than two hundred and fifty short stories, Brown won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel with The Fabulous Clipjoint. He also has some highly accomplished fans, including Neil Gaiman, Ayn Rand, and fellow DGE author Mickey Spillane, who called Brown “my favorite writer of all time.”

  In Brown’s We All Killed Grandma, Rod Britten’s first memory is speaking to the police on the phone, staring at the body of a woman with a bullet in her brain. His quest to recover his memory and find the killer puts him in grave danger: What does he know about the murder that his mind won’t let him remember?

  We hope you enjoy this foray into DGE’s illustrious past. Find us online to see the exciting new writers we’ll be launching soon.

  The Editorial Staff

  Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries

  www.duttonguiltedged.com

  www.twitter.com/DGE_Mysteries

  www.facebook.com/DuttonGuiltEdgedMysteries

  CHAPTER 1

  THE telephone directory had given me the address; it was an apartment building like any fairly new, medium-priced apartment building midway between downtown and the suburbs. Six apartments on each of six floors, the mailboxes showed. Each mailbox had a white card in a slot and each white card had a name. I looked over the names. Jensen, Raeburn, Steiner…Robin Trenholm, 3-C.

  I pressed the buzzer button and the lock on the inner door buzzed; I caught it on the second buzz and went in. From the numbering on the mailboxes, 3-C would be on the third floor. There was an automatic elevator. Empty, waiting. I got in and pressed the 3 button. The doors slid shut and a moment later slid open again; I stepped out into a hallway. I found 3-C and pressed a button in the middle of the door; I got chimes. The door opened.

  I knew it was Robin because, yesterday evening, Arch had shown me snapshots in a photograph album and said, “That’s Robin. And if you’re smart you won’t look her up. It’ll make things worse.”

  Apparently I wasn’t being smart.

  She was much prettier than the snapshots had showed her to be. She was tall, almost as tall as I, and slender. But not too slender; she had breasts and hips. She had a calm grave face, dark eyes, flawless olive skin, full lips that looked made for laughing and for kissing. Hair so black that it seemed to have a bluish tint. If it matters, she wore a yellow sweater and black skirt, black shoes, stocking-colored stockings.

  And she stood there now with the door two-thirds open, neither blocking me nor inviting me in. I might have been as complete a stranger to her as she was to me.

  “Robin?” I said.

  “Yes, Rod.” Cool and impersonal. But not antagonistic.

  “May I talk to you? May I come in?”

  I could have counted at least ten seconds. Finally she said, “All right,” and stepped back.

  I went in and glanced around. I was in a medium-sized living room, tastefully but not expensively furnished. The pictures on the wall were all prints, but good ones. Cézanne, Van Gogh, a terrifying Roualt. I liked them; probably I had chosen them. There were two doors besides the one I’d just come in; one no doubt led to a bedroom, the other to a kitchen. But they were both closed and I didn’t know which was which.

  It didn’t matter; they were doors I’d never go through again.

  Robin said, “Sit down, Rod. Since you’re here, you might as well sit down. And you look so silly standing there.”

  I’d felt silly. I sat down. I decided I’d better say something.

  I said, “Robin, I don’t know how well I can explain why I came here, why I want to talk to you. I’m not sure I understand myself. But I know I’m lost, disoriented. It’ll help to know as much as I can about myself—who and what I was before I got this damn amnesia. You’re probably the person who can tell me the most. We were married two years.”

  Her eyes narrowed a little. “You remember that?”

  I said, “I’m not playing games. I remember nothing before a few minutes after midnight Monday night. I know what I do know about myself because of what other people have told me. Mostly Arch, who tells me he’s my half-brother. I had to look up this address in the phone book. I knew you when you came to the door because of snapshots of you in an album. The amnesia is complete up to the time I mentioned; I remember everything since then, nothing before. If you can’t believe that, we’ve got no basis for discussion; I might as well leave.”

  “All right, Rod. I believe you.”

  “Then you’ll help me by answering questions? First—because it’s what I’m wondering right now, why did you doubt before you said you believed me? If you thought, or even suspected, that I’ve been faking this amnesia—and you must have heard or read that I have it—have you been thinking I was a murderer? If I am, I might be fakin
g. I can’t think of any other reason.”

  “I didn’t think—that’s not a fair question, Rod. I didn’t really think you were lying; it was just that it caught me off guard, your knowing how long we’d been married. If I’d stopped to think, I’d have realized that you’d be briefed by now, by someone, on at least the major facts and dates of your life.”

  “Tell me this, Robin. It’s probably my main question. Knowing me as well as you must have known me, could I have committed a murder?”

  “Never, in your right mind. You were—I mean, are—”

  “Stick to the past tense; it’ll be less confusing. You’re telling me what I was while we were married.”

  “You were mild, gentle, unambitious, unaggressive. You never went hunting or fishing because you didn’t like to kill things. Does that answer your question?”

  “I guess it does, as far as my right mind is concerned. But I was pretty drunk that night. Did I by any chance change character when I’d been drinking?”

  “No, you got gently philosophical.”

  I grinned. “I seem to detect a note of subtle sarcasm. I gather you’d have liked me better a little more pugnacious. But, well, thanks for answering the question. I seemed, too, to notice something about the way you said ‘unambitious’ a moment ago. Was that why you divorced me, Robin?”

  “I’d rather not talk about that.”

  “All right,” I said. “How much do you know about what happened Monday night, Robin?”

  “Just what I read in the paper the next day. I tore out the clipping and put it in my purse. Do you want to read it?”

  I started to say I didn’t and then realized that I did. I don’t know why, but I’d never got around to reading the newspaper accounts of my grandmother’s death; I hadn’t even thought about them. So I said yes, I’d like to see it.

  She got her purse from the closet and hunted through the rubble women keep in purses until she came up with a folded clipping. There was a two-column head on it:

  PAULINE TUTTLE

  SLAIN BY BURGLAR

  A Tuesday date-line and the story:

  Mrs. Pauline Tuttle, 64, of 1044 Chisolm Drive, was shot and killed at about 11:30 P.M. last night in the room of her home which she used as an office. A safe in the same room had been rifled and the screen in the window was cut through from the outside. Police believe the crime to have been the work of a professional burglar who shot Mrs. Tuttle when she walked into the room while he was at the safe. The burglar fired twice. One shot was wild; the other struck Mrs. Tuttle in the forehead just above the left eye, and death was probably instantaneous.

  It was, according to information secured by the police, the almost invariable custom of Mrs. Tuttle to work in the first-floor room of her home which served as her office from approximately eight o’clock every evening until after midnight. It was her habit, at 11:30 P.M., to leave her office and go to the kitchen to warm a glass of milk and return with it to the office to continue working for another half hour or longer. It is believed that the burglar had been watching from a place of concealment and when Mrs. Tuttle left her office to go to the kitchen he cut his way through the screen into the room where, a few minutes later, he was interrupted in his depredations by Mrs. Tuttle. This reconstruction of the crime is borne out by the fact that a broken glass in a puddle of milk was found beside the body just inside the door of the room.

  The crime was reported by Roderick Tuttle Britten, 28, of 407 Cuyahoga St., grandson of the victim. He entered the house shortly after midnight, found the body and telephoned police. From emotional shock Mr. Britten suffered an attack of amnesia and was unable to account for his movements prior to his arrival at the house or recall his reason for having come there. The police found him waiting for them, dazed and confused and, they state, he had been drinking heavily. Police investigation, after direct questioning of Mr. Britten had proved futile because of his attack of amnesia, proved that he had been elsewhere at the time of the murder and he was released in the care of the family physician, Dr. George Eggleston.

  Besides Mrs. Tuttle and her killer, the only other person present in the house at the time of the murder was the housekeeper, Mrs. May Trent, 45. Mrs. Trent was then sleeping in a room on the third floor and was not awakened by the shots. Archer Whaley Britten, half-brother of Roderick Britten and ward of Mrs. Tuttle, lives in the house but was in Chicago on the night of the crime and did not learn of it until his return this morning.

  Mrs. Pauline Tuttle, the victim of this shocking crime, is well known in real estate and financial circles in this city. Moderately wealthy and eccentric, she entered business eleven years ago at the age of 53, on small capital, and operated shrewdly and successfully in the buying and selling of real estate and securities. Her fortune has been variously estimated at from a hundred thousand to half a million dollars. Known as “Grandma Tuttle” to hundreds, she has been described by her competitors in business as “a small-scale Hetty Green.”

  Funeral services will be held…

  I didn’t read the rest of the final paragraph. Funeral services had been held, day before yesterday. And strange they had seemed to me, not knowing anyone there except those who introduced themselves as people I’d known for years. Not even knowing—I’d nearly laughed once; I remembered the joke about the stranger who had walked into a funeral parlor and had whispered to someone, “Whose funeral is this?” And the man had whispered back, as he pointed to the body in the open coffin, “His!”

  And it was funny, too, that I could remember a joke I’d probably heard years before and couldn’t remember my friends and relatives who were there at the funeral, and could feel no grief for my own grandmother who was dead, because she was a stranger to me. A tall woman with thin gray hair, gaunt and with a sharp face, a nose like a beak.

  And funny that the name Hetty Green in the newspaper story meant more to me than Grandma Tuttle’s name. I knew who Hetty Green had been, an elderly eccentric rich woman, in fact the richest woman in America, who had died early in the century and who had been the boldest and ablest woman financier of her time, who had managed all her own property personally and had left a fortune estimated at a hundred million dollars.

  Dr. Eggleston, when I’d been talking with him after he’d examined me, mostly to be sure that my amnesia had not been the result of any head injury, had used the very phrase the newspaper had used, “a small-scale Hetty Green,” in answer to a question I’d asked him about who and what Grandma had been. I’d said, “Doctor, how can I remember who Hetty Green was when I don’t remember—except that you tell me you’ve been our family doctor for fifteen years—who you are?” He’d answered me, “There’s nothing strange about that, Rod. It’s typical of general amnesia. You’ve forgotten all the events of your previous life, everything that happened to you personally and the people you knew personally, but you retain your acquired knowledge. You probably remember everything you learned in school, for example, but probably don’t remember what school you went to or who your teachers were. You remember about Hetty Green because you never knew her; if she’d been anything to you personally, part of your life in any way, she’d be blanked out with the rest. That’s common in general amnesia, Rod. There’s a kind known as complete amnesia but it’s rare; if you’d got it you’d have forgotten your acquired knowledge as well. You’d have forgotten your vocabulary—aphasia—and have to learn how to talk all over again. Not to mention how to feed yourself and dress yourself. You’d be starting from scratch.”

  I’d said, “It’s bad enough this way. Say—what kind of work did I do, and will I be able to do it again?”

  “You work for the Carver Advertising Agency, Rod. Writing advertising copy. I see no reason why you won’t be as good at it as you were before. You’ll have to get your bearings and remeet your employer and fellow employees, of course, and they’ll have to be a bit understanding while you reorientate yourself, but I think you’ll be all right. And, in all probability, this condition is tem
porary anyway. If it’s not physical—from a head injury or a brain tumor, and sometimes even then—people with amnesia almost always recover, even without treatment. Sometimes their entire memory returns as suddenly as it left and sometimes gradually they begin to remember one thing after another until they have it all back. You have no physical injury, Rod, and there’s no reason to assume a brain tumor or other organic cause. It’s obviously from shock, and psychic. Which puts it outside my field; I’m going to send you to see a psychiatrist after you’ve had a night’s sleep.”

  “I don’t want to see a psychiatrist,” I told him.

  “Why not?”

  I’d said, “I don’t know. I just don’t.”

  That had been at about four o’clock in the morning, Tuesday morning, after the police had finished with me and apparently didn’t suspect me; Dr. Eggleston had come down to the station and had driven me home—that conversation had been in his car.

  But now it was Friday and I was at Robin’s. Nothing, no faintest memory of a childhood episode, had come back to me yet. It meant nothing to be sitting in an apartment in which I’d lived for two years, in a chair I must have sat in a thousand times, talking to a beautiful woman with whom I had slept more than seven hundred nights.

  And Robin was holding her hand out for the clipping, seeing that I was no longer looking at it. Robin Trenholm, who had been—so everyone told me—Robin Britten, Mrs. Roderick Britten.

  I gave her the clipping.

  “Are the facts in it straight, Rod? Or do they have anything wrong?”

  “Pretty straight,” I said. “Probably farthest off the beam in their estimate of Grandma Tuttle’s fortune. Arch has been looking into that angle of it with a man named Hennig, a banker, who is executor of the estate, and says that after taxes and expenses and stuff there’ll be probably less than forty thousand left.”

  “You and Arch share it equally?”

  I nodded. “No other bequests, not even a cent to the housekeeper who worked for her for ten years. I’m trying to talk Arch into us giving her a thousand out of it anyway.”