They got out and Benson took him in and left him waiting in a room at the back for a few minutes, while he went off to attend to something else. This wasn’t accidental; it was the psychological build-up — or rather, breakdown — preceding the grill. It had been known to work wonders.
It didn’t this time.
Benson wiped off his smirched belt buckle on a piece of waste, ran the strap of it through the loops of his trousers, refastened it. “Take him out,” he said to the subordinate who had been lending him a hand — or rather a fist.
Willis went out on his own feet, waveringly, leaning lopsided against his escort, but on his own feet. A sense of innocence can sometimes lend one moral support. But so can a sense of having outwitted justice.
“The guy must be innocent,” the other dick remarked when he had come back.
“He knows we can’t get him. There’s nothing further in his actions to be uncovered, don’t you see? We’ve got everything there is to get on him, and it isn’t enough. And we can’t get at his intentions. They got to come out through his own mouth. All he has to do is hold out. And he’ll hold out until we kill him first, if he has to. It’s easy to keep a single, simple idea like that in your mind, even when your head is bouncing back from the four walls like a punching bag.
“What breaks down most of them is the uncertainty of something they did wrong, something they didn’t cover up right, cropping up and tripping them — an exploded alibi, a surprise identification by a material witness. He had none of that uncertainty to buck. All he had to do was sit tight inside his own skin.” He held his knuckles under the filter-tap in the corner, let a little water trickle over the abrasions.
To his lieutenant, the next day, he said: “I’m morally certain he killed her. What are the three things that count in every crime? Motive, opportunity and method. He rings the bell on each count. Motive? Well, the oldest one in the world between men and women. He was sick of her; he’d lost his head about some one else, and didn’t know how else to get rid of her. She was in the way in more than just one sense. She was a deterrent, because of the other woman’s sense of loyalty. It wouldn’t have done any good if he walked out on her or divorced her; the other woman wouldn’t have had him unless he was free, and he knew it.
“It so happens the other woman was a lifelong friend of the wife. She even lived with them, up at the 135th Street place, for a while after they were first married. Then she got out, maybe because she realized a set-up like that was only asking for trouble.”
“Have you found out who this other woman is?”
“Certainly. Vilma Lyons, the ballad singer in the same show with the wife. I went up to the theater yesterday afternoon. I questioned the two girls who shared Annie Willis’s dressing room with her. One of them talked a blue streak. The other one didn’t open her mouth; I don’t recall her making a single remark during the entire interview. She was too busy thinking back. She knew; her intuition must have already told her who had done it. At the end, she suddenly buried her face in her arms and cried. I didn’t say a word. I let her take her own time. I let her think it over. I knew she’d come to me of her own accord sooner or later. She did, after curtain time last night, down here at the station house. Weren’t we going to get the person who had done that to her friend, she wanted to know? Wasn’t he going to be punished for it? Was he going to get away with it scot-free?”
“Did she accuse him?”
“She had nothing to accuse him of. He hadn’t said anything to her. He hadn’t even shown her by the look on his face. And then little by little I caught on, by reading between the lines of what she said, that he’d liked her a little too well.”
He shrugged. “She can’t help us — she admitted it herself. Because he started giving her these long, haunting looks when he thought she wasn’t noticing, and acting discontented and restless, that isn’t evidence he killed his wife. But she knows, in her own mind, just as I know in mine, who hid that remover from Annie Willis, and with what object, and why. She hates him like poison now. I could read it on her face. He’s taken her friend from her. They’d chummed together since they were both in pigtails, at the same orphanage.”
“All right. What about Opportunity, your second factor?”
“He rings the bell there, too. And again it doesn’t do us any good. Sure, he admits he was sitting out front at the matinee day before yesterday. But so was he a dozen times before. Sure, he admits he went backstage to her dressing room, after she’d gone back to it alone and while the other two were still onstage. But so had he a dozen times before. He claims it was already missing then. She told him so, and asked him to go out and get her another bottle. But who’s to prove that? She’s not alive, and neither of the two other girls had come off the stage yet.”
“Well, what happened to the second bottle that would have saved her life?”
“He paid for it. The clerk wrapped it for him. He started out holding it in his hand. And at the drug store entrance he collided with someone coming in. It was jarred out of his hand and shattered on the floor!”
And as if he could sense what the lieutenant was going to say, he hurriedly added: “There were witnesses galore to the incident; the clerk himself, the soda jerk, the cashier. I questioned every one of them. Not one could say for sure that it wasn’t a genuine accident. Not one could swear that he’d seen Willis actually relax his hand and let it fall, or deliberately get in this other party’s way.”
“Then why didn’t he go back and tell her? Why did he leave her there like that with this stuff killing her, so that she had to send the handyman out to see if he could get hold of any for her?”
“We can’t get anything on him for that, either. He did the natural thing; he went scouting around for it in other places — the way a man would, who was ashamed to come back and tell her he’d just smashed the one bottle they had left in stock.” And through thinned lips he added acidly, “Everything he did was so natural. That’s why we can’t get him!”
The lieutenant said, “There’s an important little point in that smashed-bottle angle. Did he know it was the last bottle on hand before he dropped it, or did he only find out after he stepped back to the counter and tried to get another?”
Benson nodded. “I bore down heavy on that with the drug clerk. Unless Willis was deaf, dumb, and blind, he knew that that was the last bottle in the store before he started away from the counter with it. The clerk not only had a hard time finding it, but when lie finally located it, he remarked, ‘This is the last one we’ve got left.’ ”
“Then that accident was no accident.”
“Can you prove it?” was all Benson said.
The lieutenant answered that by discarding it. “Go ahead,” he said sourly.
“I checked with every one of the other places he told me he’d been to after leaving there, and he had asked for it in each one. They corroborated him. He wasn’t in much danger of coming across it anywhere else and he knew it! The drug clerk had not only forewarned him that he didn’t think he’d find it anywhere else, but his wife must have told him the same thing before she sent him out.” And screwing his mouth up, Benson said, “But it looked good for the record, and it kept him away from the theater — while she was dying by inches from cellular asphyxiation, without knowing it!”