“How dare you say a thing like that?”
“If he dared to do it, I can dare to say it.”
“He didn’t!” she cried. “Frank is a good man. He may have his faults, but he wouldn’t kill anyone. I know him.”
“What are his faults?”
“We won’t discuss them.”
“Then may I have a look in your garage?”
“What for? What are you looking for?”
“I’ll know when I find it.” I turned toward the garage door.
“You mustn’t go in there,” she said intensely. “Not without Frank’s permission.”
“Wake him up and we’ll get his permission.”
“I will not. He got no sleep last night.”
“Then I’ll just have a look without his permission.”
“I’ll kill you if you go in there.” She picked up the garden shears and brandished them at me — a sick-looking lioness defending her overgrown cub. The cub himself opened the front door of the cottage. He slouched in the doorway groggily, naked except for white shorts. “What goes on, Stella?”
“This man has been making the most horrible accusations.”
His blurred glance wavered between us and focused on her. “What did he say?”
“I won’t repeat it.”
“I will, Mr. Connor. I think you were Ginnie Green’s lover, if that’s the word. I think she followed you to this house last night, around midnight. I think she left it with a rope around her neck.”
Connor’s head jerked. He started to make a move in my direction. Something inhibited it, like an invisible leash. His body slanted toward me, static, all the muscles taut. It resembled an anatomy specimen with the skin off. Even his face seemed mostly bone and teeth.
I hoped he’d swing on me and let me hit him. He didn’t. Stella Connor dropped the garden shears. They made a noise like the dull clank of doom.
“Aren’t you going to deny it, Frank?”
“I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t. I admit that we — that we were together last night, Ginnie and I.”
“Ginnie and I?” the woman repeated incredulously.
His head hung down. “I’m sorry, Stella. I didn’t want to hurt you more than I have already. But it has to come out. I took up with the girl after you left. I was lonely and feeling sorry for myself. Ginnie kept hanging around. One night I drank too much and let it happen. It happened more than once. I was so flattered that a pretty young girl—”
“You fool!” she said in a deep, harsh voice.
“Yes, I’m a moral fool. That’s no surprise to you, is it?”
“I thought you respected your pupils, at least. You mean to say you brought her into our own house, into our own bed?”
“You’d left. It wasn’t ours any more. Besides, she came of her own accord. She wanted to come. She loved me.”
She said with grinding contempt: “You poor, groveling ninny. And to think you had the gall to ask me to come back here, to make you look respectable.”
I cut in between them. “Was she here last night, Connor?”
“She was here. I didn’t invite her. I wanted her to come, but I dreaded it, too. I knew that I was taking an awful chance. I drank quite a bit to numb my conscience—”
“What conscience?” Stella Connor said.
“I have a conscience,” he said without looking at her. “You don’t know the hell I’ve been going through. After she came, after it happened last night, I drank myself unconscious.”
“Do you mean after you killed her?” I said.
“I didn’t kill her. When I passed out, she was perfectly all right. She was sitting up drinking a cup of instant coffee. The next thing I knew, hours later, her father was on the telephone, and she was gone.”
“Are you trying to pull the old blackout alibi? You’ll have to do better than that.”
“I can’t. It’s the truth.”
“Let me into your garage.”
He seemed almost glad to be given an order, a chance for some activity. The garage wasn’t locked. He raised the overhead door and let the daylight into the interior. It smelled of paint. There were empty cans of marine paint on a bench beside the sailboat. Its hull gleamed virgin white.
“I painted my flattie last week,” he said inconsequentially.
“You do a lot of sailing?”
“I used to. Not much lately.”
“No,” his wife said from the doorway. “Frank changed his hobby to women. Wine and women.”
“Lay off, eh?” His voice was pleading.
She looked at him from a great and stony distance.
8.
I walked around the boat, examining the cordage. The starboard jib line had been sheared off short. Comparing it with the port line, I found that the missing piece was approximately a yard long. That was the length of the piece of white rope that I was interested in.
“Hey!” Connor grabbed the end of the cut line. He fingered it as if it was a wound in his own flesh. “Who’s been messing with my lines? Did you cut it, Stella?”
“I never go near your blessed boat,” she said.
“I can tell you where the rest of that line is, Connor. A line of similar length and color and thickness was wrapped around Ginnie Green’s neck when I found her.”
“Surely you don’t believe I put it there?”
I tried to, but I couldn’t. Small-boat sailors don’t cut their jib lines, even when they’re contemplating murder. And while Connor was clearly no genius, he was smart enough to have known that the line could easily be traced to him. Perhaps someone else had been equally smart.
I turned to Mrs. Connor. She was standing in the doorway with her legs apart. Her body was almost black against the daylight. Her eyes were hooded by the scarf on her head.
“What time did you get home, Mrs. Connor?”
“About ten o’clock this morning. I took a bus as soon as my husband called. But I’m in no position to give him an alibi.”
“An alibi wasn’t what I had in mind. I suggest another possibility, that you came home twice. You came home unexpectedly last night, saw the girl in the house with your husband, waited in the dark till the girl came out, waited with a piece of rope in your hands — a piece of rope you’d cut from your husband’s boat in the hope of getting him punished for what he’d done to you. But the picture doesn’t fit the frame, Mrs. Connor. A sailor like your husband wouldn’t cut a piece of line from his own boat. And even in the heat of murder he wouldn’t tie a granny’s knot. His fingers would automatically tie a reef knot. That isn’t true of a woman’s fingers.”
She held herself upright with one long, rigid arm against the doorframe.
“I wouldn’t do anything like that. I wouldn’t do that to Frank.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t in daylight, Mrs. Connor. Things have different shapes at midnight.”
“And hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Is that what you’re thinking? You’re wrong. I wasn’t here last night. I was in bed in my father’s house in Long Beach. I didn’t even know about that girl and Frank.”
“Then why did you leave him?”
“He was in love with another woman. He wanted to divorce me and marry her. But he was afraid — afraid that it would affect his position in town. He told me on the phone this morning that it was all over with the other woman. So I agreed to come back to him.” Her arm dropped to her side.
“He said that it was all over with Ginnie?”
Possibilities were racing through my mind. There was the possibility that Connor had been playing reverse English, deliberately and clumsily framing himself in order to be cleared. But that was out of far left field.
“Not Ginnie,” his wife said. “The other woman was Anita Brocco. He met her last spring in the course of work and fell in love — what he calls in love. My husband is a foolish, fickle man.”