Dave said, in a curiously hesitant voice, “Suicide?”
Doc Evers shrugged. “It usually is.”
“It could have been accidental,” I said.
“Possibly.”
“Either way,” I said. “She couldn’t have died here.”
“No,” said Doc, “hardly. Monoxide poisoning presupposes a closed space.”
“All right,” I said. “Why was she brought here and left on my doorstep?”
Doc Evers said, “Well, in any case, you’re in the clear. You’ve been with us since before six last evening.”
Hughie Brown’s young relative was staring at me. I realized what I was doing and shoved my hands in my pockets. I had been running my fingers over the scars that still show on my face, a nervous trick I haven’t quite been able to shake.
“Sure,” said Dave. “That’s right. You’re in the clear, Greg. No matter what.”
“That comforts me,” I said. “But not greatly.”
I went back to fingering the scars.
I had enemies in Fordstown. I went out of my way to make them, with a batch of articles I was brainless enough to write about how things were being run in the city. The people involved had used a simple and direct method of convincing me that I had made a serious error in judgment. I turned again to look at poor Marjorie, and I wondered.
A man named Joe Justinian was my chief and unassailable enemy. Chief because he was the control center of Fordstown’s considerable vice rackets, and unassailable because he owned the city administration, hoof, horns and hide.
A uniformed cop and a city detective of the Fordstown force had stood by and watched while Justinian’s boys had their fun, bouncing me up and down on the old brick paving of the alley where they cornered me. The detective had had to move his feet to keep from getting my blood on his shoes. Afterward neither he nor the cop could remember a single identifying feature about the men.
Justinian had two right-hand bowers. One was Eddie Sego, an alert and sprightly young hood who saw to it that everything ran smoothly. The other was Marjorie’s husband — now widower — Brian Ingraham. Brian was the respectable one, the lawyer who maintained in the world the polite fiction that Mr. Joseph Justinian was an honest businessman who operated a night club known as the Roman Garden, and who had various “investments.”
Brian himself was one of Justinian’s best investments. From a small lawyer with several clients he had become a big lawyer with one client.
And now his wife was dead on my doorstep.
Any way I looked at it, I couldn’t see that this night was going to bring me anything but trouble.
Hughie Brown came back with a folded sheet fresh from the laundry. Doc Evers unfolded it, crisp and white, and that was the last I ever saw of Marjorie.
Doc said, “Where’s the nearest phone?”
Chapter Two
On Monday afternoon I was in Fordstown, in the office of Wade Hickey, our current chief of police.
Brian Ingraham was there, too. He was sitting in the opposite corner, his head bowed, not looking at me or Hickey. He seemed all shrunken together and gray-faced, and his fingers twitched so that it was an effort to hold the cigarettes he was chain-smoking. I kept glancing at him, fascinated.
This was a new role for Brian. I had never seen him before when he didn’t radiate perfect confidence in his ability to outsmart the whole world and everybody in it.
Hickey was speaking. He was a big, thick-necked man with curly gray hair and one of those coarse, ruddy, jovial faces that can fool some of the people all of the time, but others for only the first five minutes.
“The reports are all complete now,” he said, placing one large hand on a file folder in front of him on the desk. “Poor Marjorie took her own life. What her reasons may have been are known only to herself and God—”
Suddenly, viciously, Ingraham said, “You’re not making a speech now, Wade. You don’t have to ham it up.”
His face was drawn like something on a rack. Hickey gave him a pitying glance.
“I’m sorry, Brian,” he said, “but these facts have to be made perfectly clear. Mr. Carver is in a peculiar position here, and he has a right to know.” He turned to me and went on.
“Marjorie’s car was found in a patch of woods off Beaver Run Road, maybe ten miles out of town. There’s an old logging cut there, and she had driven in on it about a quarter of a mile, where she wasn’t likely to be disturbed. As it happened, of course, somebody did find her, too late to be of any help—”
“Somebody,” I said, “with a fine sense of humor.”
“Or someone wanting to make trouble for you,” said Hickey. “Let’s not forget that possibility. You do have enemies, you know.”
“Yes,” I said. “What a pity they were all complete strangers.”
Hickey’s eyes got cold. “Look, Carver,” he said, “I’m trying to be decent about this. Don’t make it hard for me.”
“It seems to me,” I said, “that I’ve been shamefully co-operative.”
“Cooperation,” said Hickey, “is how we all get along in this world. You oughtn’t to be ashamed of it. Now then.” He turned a page over in the folder. “Whoever found her and removed her body left the front door open, but all the windows were tight shut except the wind-wing on the right side. That was open sufficiently to admit a hose running from the exhaust pipe. The autopsy findings agree with the preliminary reports made by the doctor up at Lakelands—”
“Doctor Evers.”
“That’s right, Doctor Evers — and the police doctor who accompanied the ambulance. Carbon-monoxide poisoning.” He closed the folder. “There’s only one possible conclusion.”
“Suicide,” I said.
Hickey spread his hands and nodded solemnly.
I looked at Brian Ingraham. “You knew her better than anybody. What do you think?”
“What is there to think?” he said, in an old, dry, helpless voice that hardly carried across the room. “She did it. That s all.” He ran the back of his hand across his eyes. He was crying.
“Now,” said Hickey, “as to why her body was removed from the car, transported approximately twenty miles and left on your porch, Carver, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. A ghoulish joke, an act of malice — a body can be an embarrassing thing to explain away — or simply the act of a nut, with no real motive behind it at all. Whatever the explanation, it isn’t important. And we certainly can’t connect you in any way with Marjorie’s death. So if I were you, I’d go home and forget about it.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess that’s the thing to do. Brian—”
“Yes.”
“Do you know of any reason? Was she sick, or unhappy?”
He looked at me, through me, beyond me, into some dark well of misery. “No, I don’t know of any reason. According to the autopsy she was in perfect health. As far as I knew” — he faltered, and then went on, in that curiously dead voice — “as far as I knew, she was happy.”
“It’s always a cruel thing to accept,” said Hickey, “when someone we love takes that way out. But we have to realize—”
“We,” said Ingraham, getting up. “What the hell have you got to do with it, you greedy, grubbing, boot-licking slob? And how would you know, anyway? You’ve never loved anything but yourself and money since the day you were born.”
He went past me and out the door.
Hickey shook his fine, big, leonine head. “Poor Brian. He’s taking this mighty hard.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well,” said Hickey, “it’s no wonder. Marjorie was a mighty fine girl.”
“Yes,” I said. I got up. “I take it that’s all?”