The interne went out, and the lieutenant sighed, flipped open the notebook, found a pencil.
“That’s about it, Mr. Brown.” The perfunctory words were filled with commiseration. “We just got here, ourselves, following a telephone call from some woman, probably a friend or neighbor we haven’t yet located, and that’s what we found. Your wife in the next room, with one empty glass — hers! Out in the kitchen, where she must have mixed it, cyanide in the bottle of brandy. No sign of a visitor. Nothing disturbed, apparently. She left no note, which is a little unusual. But you’d be surprised how often they don’t.”
“I don’t believe it,” Brown protested hotly. “She didn’t kill herself. She couldn’t. Never!”
The lieutenant sighed again, and his voice was soothing. “I know how you feel. But that’s the way it hits everybody, when it’s close to them. Because, if you realize a person is depressed and despondent, then something is done about it, more likely than not, and it never gets as far as this. There are other times a person gets into a suicidal frame of mind and doesn’t tell anybody. When that happens, naturally nobody believes it, at first.”
“I’ll never believe it,” said Brown firmly. “You’ve got to look into this. This is something else. It’s got to be.”
“Oh, don’t worry, we’ll dig into it,” the lieutenant assured him heartily, but without much personal conviction. “We won’t drop this until we’re completely satisfied. Now, where have you been this afternoon, Mr. Brown?”
Brown’s surprise was genuine. “Who—me?”
“Yes, you. We’ll begin with you. Where were you around twelve or one o’clock, for instance?”
“Having lunch in a restaurant in Philadelphia,” said Brown readily. He supplied the name of the place. “I was there for almost two hours. The waitress ought to remember me — she asked for a tip on the races, and I gave her Bold Magician. After that, I made several business calls at drugstores. My order-book is in the car downstairs. It shows where I stopped.”
The lieutenant was nodding, making only the briefest of notes. In spite of his shock and grief, Brown realized that the schedule to which he had adhered so rigidly was indeed paying off, in a serious emergency. He had never anticipated an emergency quite so drastic and dreadful. But now that it was upon him, the plan was there, a safeguard against the exposure of his illegal marriages, against even the possibility of suspicion in this present trouble.
Local newspapers, the next day, carried three-and four-paragraph stories on inside pages about the apparently impulsive, macabre suicide of Mrs. Robert D. Brown. There were pictures of the twenty-eight-year-old Bernice. One caption read: Beauty Drinks Death Cocktail. Stories mentioned Mr. Brown, who had not been at home, as a salesman traveling for Glamor-Glo Cosmetics.
Bernice had two older sisters, one of them married. These, with the brother-in-law, helped Brown with the few arrangements that had to be made. The brother-in-law confided in Brown, and Lieutenant Storber.
“To tell you the truth, I’m not surprised. Bernice was always moody and different. Most people wouldn’t notice, but there were little things gave her away, to anyone who had his eyes open.”
She was buried on the third day, at a quiet service. Brown came back to the apartment afterward, but there was nothing for him to do. He made arrangements to have the furniture stored and to terminate his lease. Then he packed his personal suitcase. It was the third day. He was due in Hartford that evening, at seven o’clock. Lucille would be expecting him — as Raymond A. Brown, salesman for a firm that manufactured smokers’ accessories.
Brown felt better after the change-over. Lucille might have her faults, but, tactfully handled and ignoring her sudden outbursts of temper, she could also be a wonderful tonic for the nerves. Bruised and shaken as his were, after the last three days, he needed an influence that would restore his normal poise and self-confidence.
Therefore it was strange, and more than frightening, when he arrived at his modest, two-story Hartford home that evening, to find a police prowl-car parked in front of it, along with others whose official look he knew too well. The newly familiar scene was only too familiar.
He felt that this was a motion picture he had seen before. He hadn’t liked it the first time, but now he was plunged, in a single moment, from uneasy disbelief to numb horror. This couldn’t be happening — not again — not to him. But it was happening. It didn’t help, for some reason it was only worse, much worse, that this time he knew all the lines by heart, including his own.
“Mr. Brown?”
“Yes. What’s the matter?”
“I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Mr. Brown. It’s your wife. I’m Lieutenant-Detective Todd. Your wife is dead.”
“Lucille? Dead? She can’t be. It’s impossible. It’s silly. This whole thing is silly. What happened?”
“Did your wife have any reason for taking her own life, Mr. Brown?”
“Lucille kill herself? No—absolutely not. That’s out of the question.” Brown’s repudiation, this time, came from more than spontaneous grief. There was black suspicion behind it. “There’s no chance she committed suicide, Lieutenant. None!”
The lieutenant’s sympathy was partly habit, but he showed a trace of real curiosity, as well. “Why do you say that, Mr. Brown? How can you be so sure?”
Brown opened his mouth to tell him why. It could not be coincidence that two of his wives, unknown to each other, had died by their own hands within a matter of days. But he checked himself in time. The mere existence of his surplus marriages, if exposed, spelled ruin.
“It wouldn’t be like her,” he said lamely. Then he collected his shattered wits and marshaled the solid facts of his alibi.
They were good enough for Lieutenant-Detective Todd. The widower had been having lunch in a quiet restaurant, fifty miles away, at the hour Lucille drank a cocktail, an old-fashioned this time, loaded with cyanide. She had been alone in the house, in the downstairs bar. The bottle of liquor used in the drink also held cyanide.
An old, dusty tin of the substance had been found among the hand-wrought bracelets, brooches and costume novelties in which Lucille dabbled, as a hobby. Again, there was no note. But Lieutenant Todd told Brown that this happened more often than most people thought.
Three days later, the same iron-clad story satisfied Detective-Inspector Casey of the Boston police, who was inquiring into the bizarre suicide of Mrs. Reynold B. Brown, housewife, of that city. Though hard-boiled, Casey and his fellow-officers were deeply touched by the protests of the bereaved husband that Helen couldn’t, wouldn’t and didn’t knowingly drink that deadly old-fashioned. Again! Their investigation would be thorough, but did Brown have any cold facts to support his refusal to accept suicide as the obvious conclusion? Anything at all except his intuition?
Brown did, indeed, have one overwhelming fact, but he was not in any position to offer it. Some unknown party or parties had a profound grudge against him and his wives, and was methodically carrying it to the extreme limit. But who? Of more immediate importance, who would be next?
The answer to the last question was simplicity itself. When they buried Helen, and Brown tried to pull his tangled thoughts together, he was at least able to perform a problem in elementary arithmetic — subtraction, unfortunately. By ruthless annulment — he hated to call it murder, in an affair so personal — he had only one wife left, Marion, in Camden.