Smith reached into a pocket and brought out something wrapped in white cloth. He unwrapped it cautiously. It was a small revolver.
“This is your gun, Dave.”
Tully stared and stared at it. “It is?” he said stupidly.
“You bought and registered it when you moved up here.”
“Well, sure. You know perfectly well why. This was the first house I finished in the development, and we were pretty much alone up here for a while. I couldn’t have Ruth...” He stopped and swallowed. He was angry at the policeman, angry at his own dry mouth and panicky thoughts. “For God’s sake, Julian! How’d you get hold of my gun? And what’s it got to do with this man Cox, whoever he is? What are you trying to tell me?”
“That it killed him,” Smith said. “We fished it out of a sewer near the motel where his body was found.”
For some reason Tully found himself groping for the half-eaten sandwich. When he realized what he was doing, he pulled his hand back and gripped the smooth cold edge of the kitchen sink. “What the bloody hell, Julian, are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry, Dave. We’ve got a pickup on her.”
“Pickup on whom?”
“Your wife.”
“Ruth?” Tully’s mouth remained open. “On Ruth?”
“I’m sorry,” the detective said again. He pushed away from the window at which he had been standing.
“This is some kind of rib.”
“I wish it were, Dave.” Smith moved toward the kitchen doorway. “Mind if I look through the house?” He kept moving in the same quiet way without waiting for a reply.
“Look all you want!” Tully shouted after him. “We never even heard of anybody named Crandall Cox! You’ve just plain flipped, Julian!”
When the detective got to the living room a few minutes later he found Dave Tully standing at the picture window. He had drawn the drapes back as far as they would go, and he was watching the street. His face was a muddier version of his hair.
He turned at Smith’s step and asked in a reasonable voice, “Who’s this Crandall Cox, Julian?”
“We’re not sure yet.”
“The gun doesn’t mean a damn thing.”
“I’m afraid it does, Dave.”
“It was just stolen from the house here.”
“Did you have a break-in?”
“We must have had.”
“‘Must have’ isn’t admissible evidence. Did you?”
“Not that I know of. But—”
“When is the last time you actually saw this gun?”
“How the devil do I know? A long time ago. Look, Julian.” Tully was still sounding reasonable. “I don’t get this at all. All right, so somehow somebody got hold of my gun and shot this Cox with it. But why Ruth? You ought to know Ruth couldn’t kill anybody.”
“How would I know that, Dave?” the detective said. “In fact, how would you know it?”
“Damn you, Julian—!” Tully yelled.
“Keep your shirt on. All I meant was that there’s a murder potential in everybody.”
“Well, even if she could, why would she? An absolute stranger!”
“Maybe not so absolute.” Julian Smith reached into his inside pocket and his manicured fingers reappeared with a police department envelope. From it he very carefully extracted a sheet of notepaper. He unfolded it and laid it on the coffee table. “I’m breaking all the rules, Dave. Read this. Just don’t touch it.”
Tully came away from the picture window reluctantly. He bent over the table. It was ordinary white typewriter stationery, its creases slightly worn, its message typed. The date in the upper right hand corner suddenly leaped up at him. If it was to be believed, the letter had been written in the short interval between his meeting with Ruth and their marriage:
Cranny—
You keep away from me, and I mean it. What happened between us is ancient history and you’d better get used to the idea. I’ve found myself a leading citizen here who’s very much interested in me and I think he’s going to ask me to marry him. You do anything to spoil my chances and it will be the last thing you ever spoil.
I’m serious, Cranny. Just forget I exist and go back to your bedroom-window romances and figuring out ways to dodge an outraged bullet. You stand a better chance of surviving at the hands of some dumb cuckold than you do at mine. I mean this.
And five weeks from the date on this thing we were married... The notepaper moved a little under Tully’s gust of breath. The detective quickly picked it up by two corners, folded it, and tucked it away.
“Typewritten and unsigned,” Tully said unsteadily. “What are you trying to pull, Julian? This can’t have anything to do with Ruth.”
“Maybe,” Smith nodded. “But there are other things, Dave. Cox arrived in town four days ago and registered at the Hobby Motel.”
Tully knew the place. The hobby for which it was notorious was as old as Adam. The motel skulked on the edge of town, a combination of tavern, restaurant and hot-pillow joint.
“The day after he checked in, Cox went down to City Hall and asked to see a marriage license issued to one Ruth Ainsworth and a man whose name he didn’t seem to know. When the news of Cox’s murder got out, the license clerk called me from City Hall and told me about Cox’s marriage-license hunt.
“Then today...”
Tully said thickly, “Well, go on, Julian! What about today?”
“Today a woman who had the room next to Cox’s came in to tell us that Cox had himself a party last night. She heard a female voice. And at one point, she says, Cox called the woman he had in his room by name. I’m sorry, Dave, but you’ll have to know sooner or later. The name Cox was overheard calling his woman-visitor was Ruth.”
Tully walked over to a chair. He sat down, his fingertips clawing at the nubby upholstery. His lips were moving, but nothing came out.
“I want you to take a look at this man, Dave. I hate to ask you to do it...”
“It’s all right,” Tully said. He got up and stood there uncertainly.
Julian Smith took the big man’s arm gently. “I wish I could spare you this, Dave. But it’s possible Cox isn’t his real name. You might recognize him.”
2
Smith was deft and quick with the whole thing. A local undertaker handled the town’s morgue cases. The man known as Crandall Cox lay under a rubber sheet on a table in the workroom of the Henshaw Funeral Home.
Smith’s touch on his arm guided Tully through the heavy sweetness of funeral flowers to the room at the rear. The mortician removed the sheet. Before Tully, in all his naked mortality, lay a stranger.
He was a medium-sized man with little fat bloats around the armpits. The flesh sagged all along the line of his jaw. His face was heavy-featured, almost coarse, with a thin, sporty mustache. The hair was black and wavy and came to a widow’s peak on the low forehead. There was one blue-black hole in the gray flab of his neck, just below the thyroid cartilage, like a misplaced third eye.
To Tully the late Crandall Cox looked like nothing human.
He tried to visualize Cox with unrelaxed flesh and blood in the tissues of his face, but it was impossible. Even in life he must have looked three-quarters dead — a slug out of some back-alley wall. To think of Ruth — cool, slim, dainty, delectable Ruth — in the arms of this cheap, gray-faced, slop-bodied, slobber-mouthed caricature of a man — made him want to laugh.
Tully looked down at him and thought, You ugly son-of-a-bitch, without any feeling whatever.
“Well?”
Tully turned. “What?” He had forgotten Lieutenant Smith.
“Well, do you recognize him?”
“No.”
“You’re sure, Dave?”
“Yes.”