“Who told you?”
“No matter. I was told.”
“So I wanted her to go away with me. She wouldn’t. I thought she’d jump at the chance to get the hell away from here and see what living could really be. My mistake. She was just as stupid as she was good-looking. No imagination. She wasn’t about to fly out of that soft nest Crawley Bratton kept for her on the other side of the creek.”
“Was that what you had the fight about yesterday afternoon?”
“What fight?”
“The one you had down by the creek. The one that ended with you strangling her to death.”
He had been looking over my shoulder, talking to me but acting all the while as if I wasn’t really there. Now he looked at me directly in sudden stillness, but I had a feeling that he couldn’t see me at all through his bright glaze of blindness.
“That’s a lie,” he said. “I didn’t strangle her to death.”
“I didn’t expect you to admit it. It doesn’t matter. There was a witness. You might be interested in knowing that there was a witness to a lot of what went on between you and Faye down there.”
“I didn’t strangle her to death. Anyone who says I did is lying.”
“Next thing you’ll be telling me you didn’t even see her yesterday afternoon.”
“No. I saw her, and we had a fight, and I choked her. But not to death. I wanted to, and I thought for a few seconds that I had, but I didn’t. I let her go alive. The last I saw of her, she was leaning against a tree and breathing easy. I came up here and got the car and went off on a drunk. I never wanted to see her again, and that much was given me. I never will.”
“Well, you never know. Could be you’ll wind up in the same place pretty soon.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’ll stand trial for murder. Maybe you’ll hang.”
He sat there staring at me with his blind eyes, and I had an uneasy notion that he was going to spring at me any second, but he didn’t. He took a deep breath and looked away, over my shoulder again.
“Am I under arrest?” he said.
“That’s right. You are.”
“You’re making a mistake. You’ll see.” He stood up and looked toward the house. “If you’ll wait out here, I’ll get some things together and say good-by.”
I let him go. He went across the yard and into the house, and he was in there for maybe fifteen minutes. He came out carrying a little leather bag, and we got into the patrol car and drove back to town. In the office at the jail, Rudy was sitting in a chair away from the desk with his feet on the floor. He must have heard us coming.
“Hello, Colby,” he said. “Hello, Fergus. What you two doing together?”
“He’s under arrest for murder,” I said. “Lock him up.”
“Murder!” Rudy jumped as if his chair was wired and someone had thrown the switch. “Whose murder?”
“How many murders we had around here lately, Rudy?”
“Faye Bratton’s, you mean?”
“Faye Bratton’s, I mean.”
“Well, Jesus, Colby. I got to thinking after you left, and what I thought was Snuffy Cleaker must have done it.”
“You weren’t thinking, Rudy. Your brain was just turning over. There’s a difference.”
“That may be, Colby, if you say so, but I’m thinking now for sure, and what I’m thinking is you ought to tell me more about what’s going on.”
“Excuse me, Rudy. I’ll try to do better. Right now I’m going back to Crawley Bratton’s to tell him we’ve made an arrest, and then I’m coming in to see the county attorney. Tell Lard two more for dinner instead of one.”
I went out and got into the patrol car and drove west for the third time that day. I stood beside the car in Crawley’s back yard and looked out over all the fields as far as I could see, but there wasn’t any sign of Crawley out there, and so I went over and hammered on the back door of the house, but there wasn’t any sight or sound of him there, either. Then I went out to the barn and inside, and there he was. He was lying on his back on the rough plank floor, and nearby, where it had fallen from his hands, was a double barreled 12-gauge shotgun. Most of the top of Crawley’s head was off. Some of it was on the floor, and the rest was on the wall behind him. There was something else on the wall, too. It was a note pinned to the planking with Crawley’s pocket knife. I went over and ripped the note loose and read it, and this is what Crawley had written:
Colby:
I thought you’d find out, and I’m glad you did. Thanks again for letting me know you knew, and for giving me time to get out of it my own way. This is it, Colby. This is the way. It was a tough break, that dumb kid seeing me kill Faye, but it’s all right. I don’t think I could have lived with myself very long, knowing all the time I was a murderer. I wasn’t cut out for it.
I didn’t really plan to kill her. I just walked down to the creek to find her and bring her back, and there she was with her dress torn, and she’d been crying, and I could see someone had treated her rough. She said it was Fergus Cass who did it, and wanted me to go find him and kill him. Instead, I killed her. I finished what he’d started, and killed her. I guess I knew right along that she’d been carrying on with him. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself. A man’s pride keeps him from admitting things sometimes. Maybe later I’d have killed Fergus Cass, too. I was thinking about it, and so I guess it’s better it’s ending this way before I could.
You can imagine how surprised I was when the haystack caught fire. I was going back after dark to bury her. I had a place picked out.
I hope you find me soon, Colby. See that we’re buried together.
Chapter 5
Well, hell. So it was just a misunderstanding. So I figured it was Fergus Cass, and all the time it was Crawley. I can see, looking back, how the misunderstanding came about naturally. When I came up from the creek with Snuffy Cleaker and said that Snuffy had seen someone choking Faye, not saying who it was Snuffy had seen, and then making that crack about Crawley knowing as well as I did who it was, why, what the hell was he naturally to think? Being guilty, although I didn’t know it, he thought there was only one person I could possibly mean, and that person was Crawley Bratton, although it wasn’t. The only reason he could see for my not arresting him then was just to give him a chance to take his own way out, and that’s why he said thanks when I left, and took the way when I was gone.
I’m glad he did, and I think it’s time Virgil had my job.
Tune Me In
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1960.
“Wake up,” the voice said.
Freda opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling and waited for the voice to continue, but it was silent. This was not in the least disturbing, however, for sometimes it did not speak to her for hours and hours on end, and then it would speak suddenly, at some odd moment, with specific instructions to do this or that in a particular way at such and such a time. In the beginning the voice had frightened Freda, in the very beginning, but she had soon understood that there was nothing at all to be frightened of, quite the contrary, and she had begun waiting for the voice and listening for it, but she never knew when it would speak. Sometimes it spoke to her when she was quite alone, but at other times it would speak when she was in company, even when she was herself speaking to someone else, and then she would have to quit speaking, perhaps in the middle of a sentence, and listen intently to what the voice said. This was always disconcerting to the other person, of course, the one she was speaking to, and it was really very amusing, in a sense, a kind of comic situation to be laughed at silently.