We All Killed Grandma Read online

  “Which is?”

  “Which might be that you’re afraid that you killed Grandma Turtle.”

  “I—don’t think so. And the police are sure I didn’t.”

  “More sure than you are. I’d say you know yourself well enough, even after this short an acquaintance, to feel sure that you didn’t kill her sanely, deliberately. But you’re probably afraid—consciously or subconsciously—that you were insane. You’re afraid that you’d give yourself away under hypnosis—give yourself away to yourself, that is. The fact of your giving yourself away to someone else, to the psychiatrist, wouldn’t be a factor because if you knew that you killed Grandma Tuttle, you’d give yourself up.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know you. I know damned well you wouldn’t commit a murder, drunk or sober, sane. And that if you found out that you’d gone insane and committed one, you wouldn’t let yourself run loose for fear it would happen again.”

  “I—I guess I wouldn’t. But, damn it, I still don’t want to be psychoanalyzed or hypnotized. Doesn’t amnesia always either wear off or end suddenly of its own accord?”

  “Almost always, especially when and if the causes for it are removed. Listen, Rod, let me tell you one thing. You didn’t kill her. I’m sure.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “The same reasons the police have—plus knowing you, plus a plain knowledge of psychology. You as a conscious, sane murderer I can’t picture at all. And you as a psychopathic murderer doesn’t fit the picture.”

  “Why not?”

  He dug a pipe and a pouch of tobacco out of his pockets, arching himself in the chair to get at them. He said, “You were drunk. You were drunk because Robin was getting her divorce the next day. Damn good reason, and you wouldn’t have got pie-eyed for a lesser one. Now out of that drunk—which concerned Robin and not Grandma—nobody could convince me that you suddenly got the idea to kill your grandmother, sanely or psychopathically. There’d be no reason for it, and even a psychopath operates on what looks to him like reason.”

  “Suppose I thought I had a reason. Suppose I got the sudden hunch—right or wrong—that Grandma had something to do with Robin’s divorcing me. Maybe that she engineered it. Paranoia gives people wilder ideas than that.”

  “But you weren’t paranoiac. That’s nothing that hits people suddenly and I’d have noticed the signs. You were always nervous, mildly neurotic in a few ways, but damn it you weren’t even incipiently paranoiac. Besides—all right, suppose you’re drunk and get that sudden wild idea. I’ll buy that, as a remote possibility. I’ll say there’s a chance in a million you might have gone there and shot her. But not even that much chance that you’d have worked out all the details that make it look like a burglary. Cut through the screen—from the outside. Open the safe and take the money out. Take it and the gun you shot her with away and hide them so well that they haven’t been found yet. Then go back and pretend to discover the body and phone the police. And—nyah! Too ridiculous to talk about. Especially while you were drunk. Sane or insane you couldn’t have worked out all those details—and well enough to fool the police—while you were drunk.”

  It did sound ridiculous, the way he put it.

  He stopped a minute and got his pipe going again; it had gone out while he was talking. He shook out the match and tossed it at the open window behind him; it missed and fell to the floor.

  He said, “Newspaper stories always get a few things wrong, and that’s all I got to go on. Mind talking about it, answering some questions?”

  “Shoot.”

  “What’s the first thing, chronologically, that you remember?”

  “I was standing with a telephone in my hand, in a lighted room, and apparently I’d been talking into the telephone. Somebody had just asked me my name, I remembered that, and I was trying to answer. I couldn’t think of it. I remember how silly I felt, trying to think of my own name and not being able to. And I was aware of being pretty drunk. But the shock of not remembering my own name—well, that’s the first thing I remember.”

  “Not even a few seconds sooner? Someone asking you?”

  “Well—no. I mean, I don’t remember the question or the way it was worded. But I had the telephone in my hand and I knew someone had just asked me who I was.”

  “Your first reaction?”

  “Annoyance. The kind of mild annoyance you feel when you’re trying to think of a word or a name and you just can’t think of it.”

  “Aphasia. We all get touches of it now and then. But—go on.”

  “I looked around me. And there was a dead woman lying on the floor—and I still couldn’t remember who I’d been talking to on the phone or who I was or what anything was all about. It was the God damnedest feeling. I’d never seen the dead woman before in my life, as far as I knew. Or the room.”

  “You knew right away she was dead?”

  “There was a bullet hole in her forehead, over one eye. There was a lot of blood on the rug under her. And the way she lay there—yes, I knew she was dead. Then the telephone was talking in my ear. With a man’s voice. ‘Hello, hello! Are you still there?’ And I said, ‘I’m still here.’ ‘Who is this? Who’s calling?’ And I said, ‘I—don’t know.’ The voice got tough. ‘Listen, Mister, you just reported a murder. Are you crazy?’ I said the only thing I could think of that made sense; I said, ‘You’d better trace this call and send someone here.’ I put the telephone down on the desk with the receiver off the hook so he could trace it.”

  Radik’s pipe had gone out again and he was puffing at it, trying to get it started again. He gave up. “For someone as confused as you must have been, that was pretty clear thinking. Especially drunk. How much had you had to drink?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  He chuckled. “That sounded like a trap question, but I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, has it been learned since where you did your drinking or how much of it you did?”

  “No to both questions. Do you think, Pete, that I’d have gone off on a solitary bender or that I’d have hunted company to drink with?”

  He thought that over a minute before he said, “Damned if I know, Rod. That would have been the first time since I’ve known you that you deliberately set out to drown your sorrows—if that’s what you did do. Ordinarily you’re not a solitary drinker, but that could have been an exception because of the circumstances. But why worry about it? If you were with someone, you’ll find out sooner or later. If you don’t find out, it’s pretty good proof that you were alone.”

  It sounded sensible.

  CHAPTER 4

  SUNDAY afternoon, five o’clock. I left the Lincoln—with several hundred miles on it since I’d got it yesterday morning—in front of 407 Cuyahoga Street, home. I’d had a room there since Robin and I had separated a month before. Over Arch’s protests, he’d told me; he’d wanted me to come and live with Grandma Tuttle, as he was doing. But I’d wanted privacy and a place of my own. At least, those had been the reasons I’d given Arch, and they were probably true, if not all of the truth.

  Number 407 Cuyahoga was the name of the place as well as the address; it was an apartment hotel, mostly bachelor and mostly respectable. The elevator was upstairs somewhere, so I started for the steps until Rosabelle’s voice called me. “Oh, Mr. Britten, there’s a call for you.” Rosabelle is the redhead who works the day shift on the desk and switchboard. She was holding out a slip of paper and I took it and glanced at it. A telephone number, one I didn’t recognize, for me to call. I said, “Thanks, Rosabelle,” and stuffed it into my pocket.

  “It was a girl’s voice,” she said. Trust Rosabelle to have noticed that; I had learned—or relearned—that much about her in the last five days. She said, “But she wouldn’t leave a name, just that phone number.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll call it from upstairs as soon as I get there.” And I went on up the steps. I hoped the call wasn’t from Robin, to cancel our dinner date two hours fro
m then.

  My apartment was a one-room and kitchenette deal, but I’d found only coffee and its accessories in the kitchenette part, so obviously I hadn’t used it to get any of my own meals. Cream for coffee and a few cans of beer constituted the sole contents of the refrigerator.

  I picked up the phone as soon as I was inside and said, “Okay, Rosabelle, you can try that number for me now. Spring four eight three seven.”

  A voice with a thick Teutonic accent answered the ringing. A man’s voice. “Yess. Who you vant?”

  “Rod Britten speaking,” I said. “Someone from that number phoned me and wanted me to call back. A woman’s voice.”

  “You must have wrong number, no woman here.”

  I glanced at the slip in my hand. “Is this Spring four eight three seven?”

  “Yah. Sbring four eight three seven. But no woman iss here. No woman uses phone here. Just me, my brother.”

  I told him I was sorry and hung up, then picked up the phone again and got Rosabelle’s voice. “Did you hear that, Rosabelle?”

  “Hear what, Mr. Britten?” Her voice sounded too innocent to believe. “I don’t listen in on calls, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Of course not, Rosabelle,” I said. “But that number is a Chinese laundry and the proprietor spoke only Lithuanian. You must have got the number wrong. Did you by any chance put it on a scratch pad before you copied it onto the slip you gave me?”

  “No, Mr. Britten. I put numbers right on the call slips. Gee, I’m sorry if I got it wrong.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “What time did the call come?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  “Okay, don’t worry about it.” I put the phone back and looked up my own name in the telephone book to see if it had been Robin who phoned. But the number wasn’t remotely similar; it wasn’t even a Spring exchange. So if Robin had called, she hadn’t made the call from home. And there wasn’t anything I could do about it except keep the appointment.

  I took a leisurely bath and shaved and dressed for dinner. Then, because I still had time to kill and was still curious about that telephone call I phoned Arch and asked him if he knew of any number similar enough to that one to have been mistaken for it. He didn’t.

  “You say it was a girl, Rod?”

  “So the operator here says,” I told him. “Have I been chasing around with any during the last month?”

  “Not that I know of, but I wouldn’t necessarily know. I don’t know why you shouldn’t have been, though. No reason for your having been monastic, but you didn’t happen to mention any dates to me. Sure you haven’t got a little black book of telephone numbers that would give you the answer?”

  “Not that I’ve discovered. Well, thanks anyway, Arch.”

  “Hey, don’t hang up. Listen, I’ve got an appointment with Hennig in the morning—the executor of the estate. About probating the will, selling the house, all that kind of thing. You ought to be with me—you know, in case signatures are required on anything.”

  “All right,” I said. “Where and when?”

  “Meet me at nine-thirty at the Rexall drugstore at Fourth and Main. That’s in the same building as Hennig’s office. The appointment’s for ten; that’ll give us time to have a cup of coffee and talk a while first.”

  I told him that sounded like a good idea.

  I reached Robin’s at exactly seven and, miraculously, she was dressed and ready. She even had drinks made. Tinkling Tom Collinses. It was nice to sit there staring at her over the rim of a cool glass. Definitely, in a blue evening gown, she was worth staring at. She was beautiful.

  “Any place special you’d like to go, Robin?”

  “Anywhere you say.”

  “Niagara Falls?” I shouldn’t have said it; I could tell by her face. I didn’t wait for her to answer. “Or maybe Ricci’s?”

  “No, Rod. Anywhere but Ricci’s.”

  Memories, maybe? Something in the way she said it made me think it could be that. Dangerous ground; I changed it quickly. I shrugged and said, “You name it, then. By the way, you didn’t happen to phone me this afternoon and leave a Spring exchange number, did you?”

  She shook her head. “What made you think it was I?”

  “Just that it could have been, if something had come up in connection with our date tonight. And I couldn’t think of anyone else it might have been. You couldn’t make a guess, could you?”

  “I couldn’t make a guess. Why didn’t you simply call the number?”

  I explained that, and then turned down a second drink unless she wanted one, and she didn’t. In the car, I remembered reading in the paper, a few days before, of the opening of a new dinner-and-night-club called The Big Wheel and suggested that we try it. We couldn’t ever have gone there. We went.

  It wasn’t a bad place. The orchestra was strictly from Lombardo, but it was danceable-to and talkable-against. And ten dollars brought a good three-dollar dinner. The floor show was tolerable, but fortunately our table was far enough away that we didn’t have to tolerate it.

  I found Robin still unwilling to discuss our marriage—at least in any more detail than she had told me about it Friday afternoon, so I took the safer tack of having her tell me about the friends we’d had, people we’d spent evenings with and what we’d liked and disliked about each. It wasn’t what I’d wanted to talk about, but it was information that would come in handy so I tried to remember as much of it as I could. Some of it duplicated, but added to, things Arch had already told me, but most of it was new. When and as I remet the people she was telling me about, it would be helpful to know how well I’d known and liked them, and a few facts about who they were and what they did.

  So I tried to concentrate, but mostly I watched Robin. And wondered what, really, had gone wrong between us.

  Something had. And I had a strong hunch that it was something she hadn’t even hinted at, as yet. Something much stronger.

  Coffee. I suggested a brandy to go with it, and Robin agreed. But she said, “After that, though, I’m going to ask you to take me home, Rod.”

  “So soon?” I glanced at my watch. “Why, it’s only ten. The evening hasn’t started.”

  “I know it’s early. But I want to be in bed and asleep by eleven. Tomorrow’s Monday and I want to get a bright and early start at job hunting, and with a good night’s sleep behind me.”

  “Why the hurry? You don’t have to find a job right away.”

  “No, I’ve got a few hundred in the bank. But I’d rather keep it as a backlog. And besides, if I’m going to start a new life for myself—and I am—the sooner I get started, the better.”

  “You’re better off than that, Robin. A few hundred in the bank, but over nine thousand coming.”

  “What? What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Your share of the inheritance from Grandma Tuttle. Half of my share.”

  “Rod, are you crazy? We’re divorced. I haven’t any share in that.”

  “Why not? Our agreement, you told me, was to split even on what money we had. Grandma Tuttle died, and I became her heir, before our divorce, so the inheritance—my share of it—would come under that agreement, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would not, definitely. I typed that agreement from Dad’s dictation and I know what it says. It divides our property specifically as of the date thereon and does not apply to anything acquired by either of us thereafter, before or after the divorce. Besides, you haven’t got the money yet. Until the will is probated, you haven’t got it. No, definitely, I haven’t any share in that money. And I don’t want it.”

  Her chin was up, her eyes were flashing. Then they softened suddenly and she put her hand on top of mine on the table. She said, “I suppose I should have guessed you’d make a Quixotic offer like that, Rod. You always were a sucker when it came to money.”

  “But you’re sure—”

  “I’m positive. And I don’t even want to talk about it.”

  Her hand left min
e, and my hand felt suddenly cold and naked.

  “Was that what we quarreled about, Robin? My attitude toward money?”

  She frowned a little. “It was a contributory factor. Rod, please quit trying to pin me down on that. It was a lot of little things, not any one big one. We—we just found we weren’t compatible. That’s all there is to it and I don’t want to try to analyze it any further than that. Please.”

  I didn’t believe it. But I said, “All right, I’ll quit heckling you about it.” And I caught our waiter on the fly and ordered brandies.

  The orchestra was starting an old one, but a good one, To Each His Own.

  I said, “We haven’t danced. Will you dance with me, Robin?”

  We weaved our way through the tables to the dance floor. I put my arm about her and we danced. We fitted, her body against mine, and we moved as one. No incompatibility here, in dancing.

  Then, suddenly, it was different, and she was away from me. Inches only, but it might as well have been miles. I tried to pull her back, but her rigid body resisted. Our feet moved together in perfect rhythm; we were two people dancing in time to the same music, and that was all.

  The number ended; it had been the first of a set but Robin said, “I don’t want to dance any more, Rod. And the waiter just brought our brandies. Shall we go back to the table?”

  We went back to the table, and I wished that I dared ask the question that I wanted to ask.

  But Robin was already saying, “Rod, we shouldn’t do this again. See one another, I mean. It can’t do any good, and—it can hurt one of us.”

  I wondered whether she meant herself or me. But it wasn’t the time to ask questions or to argue. Nor yet to accept her statement so flatly. I said, “Let’s not decide that now. And—all right, I won’t bother you, Robin, but little things are going to come up that I’m going to have to ask you about. I may at least phone you, mayn’t I?”