Now is when you can make the mistake, Joe Pettigrew said in his mind. I wish I had Joseph to talk to. I feel clear in my mind. I feel okay, but these boys aren’t dumb. Especially the one with the soft voice and the Jewish eyes. Nothing that dumb ever carried a badge. Nice guy, but he won’t fool. I come home and the cops have the house and somebody’s called in about a gun and the front window’s broken and the room’s been gone over until it looks all tired out. And there’s a stain there that could be blood. And those chalk marks could be the outline of a body. And Gladys isn’t around and Porter Green isn’t around. Well, how would I act if I didn’t know anything about it? Perhaps I don’t care. I guess that’s it. I just don’t care what these birds think. Because any time I change my mind about being here I don’t have to be here. Wait a minute though. It doesn’t settle anything. It’s murder and suicide. It has to be, because it couldn’t be anything else. I’m not going to think that away. If it’s murder and suicide, then I don’t mind being here. I’m fine.
“A suicide pact,” he said out loud, as if thoughtfully. “Porter Green didn’t seem the type. Nor my wife—Gladys. Too shallow and too selfish.”
“Nobody said anything about anybody being dead,” Rehder said harshly.
That’s a real cop, Joe Pettigrew thought. Like in the movies. Him I don’t mind. Doesn’t like anybody to have an idea or make an obvious deduction. That’s a fat-headed remark he made, if ever I heard one. Out loud he said:
“How obvious does it have to get?”
Waldman smiled faintly. “Only one shot was heard, Mr. Pettigrew. If the informant heard correctly. And frankly, since we don’t know the informant, we haven’t been able to question him. But it was not a suicide pact. I can assure you of that. And since I have stopped being subtle—although I don’t think you have—let me say at once that the radio officers found Porter Green dead where you see those marks. His chest was where you see that bloodstain. He bled very little. He was shot through the heart—quite accurately—at a distance that makes suicide very unlikely. Previous to that he had strangled your wife, after a rather violent struggle.”
“He didn’t know women as well as he thought he did,” Joe Pettigrew said.
“This guy is shaking with excitement”, Rehder put in nastily. “Just like an iron deer on somebody’s front lawn.”
Waldman waved his hand and kept the smile on his face. “This isn’t a performance, Max,” he said without looking at his partner. “Although I know you give a very good one. Mr. Pettigrew is a very intelligent level-headed man. We don’t know too much about his home life, but we know enough to suspect that it was not happy. He pretends to no false grief. Right, Mr. Pettigrew?”
“Exact.”
“I thought so. Also, not being an idiot, Max, Mr. Pettigrew knows perfectly well from the appearance of this room, from our being here, and from our manner, that something serious has happened. He may even have expected something of the sort to happen.”
Joe Pettigrew shook his head. “One of her boy friends beat her up once,” he said calmly. “She disappointed him. She disappointed all of them. He even wanted to beat me up.”
“Why didn’t he?” Waldman asked, as if the situation was the most natural thing in the world—a wife like Gladys, a husband like Joe Pettigrew, and a roomer like Porter Green or a reasonable facsimile of Porter Green.
Joe Pettigrew smiled even more faintly than Waldman had smiled. This was something they were not going to know. His physical skills, which he seldom used, and then only at climacteric moments. Something in reserve, like what was left of Professor Bingo’s sample of snuff.
“Probably didn’t think it worth while,” he answered.
“Quite a man, ain’t you, Pettigrew?” Rehder sneered. A little taste of male disgust was rising in him, like bile.
“As I said,” Waldman went on peacefully, “from the appearance of things when we got here we could assume a rather violent scene. The man’s face was badly scratched and the woman was badly bruised up—in addition to the usual signs of strangulation—never too pleasant to a sensitive man. Are you a sensitive man, Mr. Pettigrew? You’ll have to identify her body, even if you are.”
“That’s the first snide remark you’ve made, Lieutenant.”
Waldman flushed. He bit his lip. He was himself a very sensitive man. Pettigrew was right. “I’m sorry,” he said and as if he meant it sincerely. “You now understand what we found here. Since you’re the husband—and since so far as we know now it’s uncertain when you left the house—you would normally be a suspect for one of these deaths, and possibly both.”
“Both?” Joe Pettigrew asked. He showed real surprise this time, and he instantly knew it was a mistake. He tried to retrieve it. “Oh, I see what you mean. The scratches on Porter Green—and the blows on my wife’s body like you said—don’t prove he strangled her. I might have shot him and then strangled her—while she was unconscious or helpless from the beating.”
“This guy’s got no emotions at all,” Rehder said with a kind of wonder.
Waldman said gently: “He has emotions, Max. But he has lived with them a long time. They are pretty deep. Right, Mr. Pettigrew?”
Joe Pettigrew said he was right. He didn’t think he had quite retrieved the mistake, but he might have.
“The wound on Porter Green was definitely not a typical suicide wound,” Waldman went on. “It wouldn’t be, even if you picture a man coolly and quietly deciding to kill himself for what seem to him good reasons—if a suicide ever is cool and quiet. Some of them do seem to be. But a man who had just passed through a violent scene—for such a man in such a mental state to hold a gun as far from his body as he could reach and deliberately and accurately aim it at his heart and pull the trigger—nobody could really believe that, Mr. Pettigrew. Nobody.”
“So I did it,” Pettigrew said and looked straight at Waldman’s eyes.
Waldman stared at him and then turned to put his cigarette out in an amber glass tray. He ground it back and forth until the stub was shapeless. He spoke without looking at Pettigrew, a man thinking out loud, perfectly relaxed in his thinking.
“There are two objections to that. That is, there were. First, the windows were locked—all the windows. The door of this room was locked and although you would have a key, being the landlord—oh, by the way, I suppose you are the landlord?”
“I own the house,” Pettigrew said.
“Your key would not open this door because of a deadlatch which is separate from the lock. The door into your kitchen can’t be opened from the other side until a bolt on this side is turned. There’s a trap door to the cellar, but it leads nowhere outside the house. We’ve determined that. So we thought at first that no one but himself could have killed Porter Green, because no one could have left the room after killing him and left it locked up as it was locked up. We found an answer to that.”
Joe Pettigrew felt a slight tingling on the skin of his temples. His mouth seemed to feel dry and his tongue seemed large and stiff in it. He almost lost control. He almost said, there isn’t any way. There just isn’t. If there was, the whole thing would be a laugh. Professor Bingo would be a laugh. Why the hell would I stand inside the window and wait for the cop to break the glass and climb in and then right behind his back, not ten feet from him, step out onto that porch and soft shoe away and away and away? Why would I bother with all that and the rest of it and the dodging people on the streets and the not having any coffee or any way to get anywhere and not being able to speak to anybody, why would I do all that if there was a way out of the room that a couple of flatfeet would find?
He didn’t say it. But his saying it in his mind did something to his face. Rehder leaned forward a little further and his tongue showed its tip between his lips. Waldman sighed. Funny neither he nor Max had thought of the killer having killed both of them.
“The furnace,” he said in a cool detached voice.
Pettigrew stared and slowly his head went around and he was looking at the g
rating of the floor furnace, the two gratings, one horizontal and one upright where it cut into the wall between this room and the hall. “The furnace,” he said and looked back at Waldman. “Why the furnace?”
“It was intended to send heat into the hall as well as this room, probably with the idea the heat would rise to the upper part of the house. Between the two parts of the furnace—that is, between the two rooms, there is a sheet iron screen hanging on a rod. It is intended to divert the heat where you want it. It will blank either of the upright gratings and put most of the heat into one outlet, or if it hangs straight up and down as we found it, the heat goes in both directions.”
“A man could get through that?” Pettigrew asked wonderingly.
“Not every man. You could. The screen moves easily. We’ve tried it. One of our technical men went through. The available space is about twelve by twenty inches. Ample for you, Mr. Pettigrew”
“So I killed them and got out that way” Joe Pettigrew said. “I’m brilliant. Really brilliant. And put the gratings back afterwards”.
“Nothing to that. They are not screwed down, just held in position by their weight. We tried it, Mr. Pettigrew. We know” He rumpled his dark wavy hair. “Unfortunately that’s not a complete solution.”
“No?” A pulse was beating in Joe Pettigrew’s temple. A hard little angry hammer of a pulse. He was tired. The long accumulated tiredness of many small tirednesses. Yes, he was very tired now. He put his hand in his pocket and felt the crumpled box of snuff wrapped in the paper towel.
Both the detectives tensed. Rehder’s hand went to his hip. He leaned his weight forward on his feet.
“Just snuff,” Joe Pettigrew said.
Waldman stood up. “I’ll take that,” he said sharply, and stood over Joe Pettigrew.
“Just snuff. Quite harmless.” Joe Pettigrew opened the package and dropped the piece of paper towel on the floor. He lifted off the crumpled lid of the box. He touched his finger to the spoonful of white powder that was all that was left. Two good pinches, no more. Two reprieves.
He turned his hand and emptied the powder on to the floor.
“I never saw snuff that colour,” Waldman said. He took the emptied box. The writing on the smashed cover was blurred with dirt. It could be read, but not quickly.
“It’s snuff all right,” Joe Pettigrew said. “It’s not poison. At least not the kind you’re thinking of. I don’t want it any more. What’s the rest of your analysis, Lieutenant?”
Waldman moved back and away from him, but he didn’t sit down again.
“The other objection to the idea of murder is that there was no point in it—if it was Green that strangled your wife. Until you mentioned it, I hadn’t thought of anything else. That makes you a reasonably sharp man, Mr. Pettigrew. If the finger marks on her throat—which are very clear and will be clearer still—come from your hands, there’s no more to say.”
“They didn’t,” Joe Pettigrew said. He held his hands out, palms up. “You ought to be able to tell. Porter Green’s hands are twice as big as mine.”
“If that is so, Mr. Pettigrew,” and Waldman’s voice began to rise in tone and volume as he spoke, “and your wife was already dead and you shot Porter Green, not only was it silly of you to run away and make an anonymous telephone call, because even if this could have been a deliberate murder on your part, no jury would convict you of as much as manslaughter—you had a perfect defense—self-defense…” Waldman was now speaking very loudly and clearly, although not shouting, and Rehder was watching him with a reluctant admiration. “If you had simply picked up the telephone and called the police and said you shot him because you heard a scream and had come downstairs with a gun and this man was half naked and had blood all over his face from the scratches and he had rushed at you and you…” Waldman’s voice faded—”shot at him, by pure instinct. Anybody would believe that,” he ended quietly.
“I didn’t see the scratches until after I shot him,” Joe Pettigrew said.
A dead silence fell into the room. Waldman stood with his mouth open, the final words hanging on his lips. Rehder laughed. He reached his hand back again and took the gun from his hip holster.
“I was ashamed,” Joe Pettigrew said. “Ashamed to look at his face. Ashamed for him. You wouldn’t understand. You hadn’t lived with her.”
Waldman stood silent, his chin down, his eyes brooding. He moved forward. “I’m afraid that’s all, Mr. Pettigrew,” he said quietly. “It’s been interesting, and a little painful. Now we’ll go where we have to go.”
Joe Pettigrew laughed sharply. Just for a moment Waldman masked Rehder with his body. Joe Pettigrew went sideways out of the chair and seemed to twist in mid-air like a dropped cat. He was in the doorway.
Rehder yelled at him to stop. Then, too quickly, he fired. The shot knocked Joe Pettigrew clear across the hall. He hit the far wall, flopped his arms and half turned. He sat down with his back against the wall and his mouth and eyes open.
“Some boy,” Rehder said, walking stiff legged out past Waldman. “Betcha he did them both in, Lieutenant”.
He bent down, then straightened and turned putting his gun away. “No ambulance,” he said tersely. “Not that I meant it that way. You made it tough for me.” Waldman stood in the doorway. He lit another cigarette. His hand shook a little. He looked at it waving the match out.
“Ever occur to you that he might be perfectly innocent after all?”
“Not a chance, Lieutenant. Not a shadow. I’ve seen too many.”
“Too many of something,” Waldman said distantly. His dark eyes were cold and angry. “You saw me frisk him. You knew he was not armed. How far could he have run? So you killed him because you like to show off. For no other reason.”
He went past Rehder into the hall and bent down over Joe Pettigrew He put a hand inside his jacket and felt his heart. He straightened and turned.
Rehder was sweating. His eyes were narrow and his whole face looked unnatural. He still had the gun in his hand.
“I didn’t see you frisk him,” he said thickly.
“So you think I’m a damn fool,” Waldman said coldly. “Even if you’re not lying—and you are lying.”
“You rank me,” Rehder said with a harsh rustle in his voice. “But you can’t call me a liar, bud.” He lifted the gun a little. Waldman’s lip curled with contempt. He didn’t say anything. After a moment, slowly, Rehder swung the gate of his gun out and blew through the barrel, and then put the gun away. “I made a mistake,” he said, in a strained voice. “You tell it any way you like. And you better get you another partner. Yeah—I shot too quick. And the guy could have been innocent like you say. Crazy, anyway. Most they’d have done would be to commit him. Say a year, nine months. And he comes out to a happy life without Gladys. I spoiled all that.”
Waldman said almost gently, “Crazy in a sense, no doubt. But he meant to kill both of them. The whole set-up points to that. We both know it. And he didn’t get out through the floor furnace.”
“Huh.” Rehder’s eyes jumped and his mouth fell open.
“I was watching him when I told him about it. That, Max, was the only thing we told him that really surprised him.”
“He had to. Wasn’t any other way.”
Waldman nodded, then shrugged. “Say we haven’t found any other way—and we don’t have to now. I’ll call in.”
He went past Rehder into the living-room and sat down at the telephone.
The front door bell rang. Rehder looked down at Joe Pettigrew and then at the door. He stepped softly along the hall. He stepped to the door and opened it about six inches, holding it that way. He looked out at a tall angular wasted-looking man who wore a top hat and an opera cloak, although Rehder didn’t know exactly what an opera cloak was. The man was pale and had deep-set black eyes. He took the hat off and bowed a little.
“Mr. Pettigrew?”
“He’s busy. Who wants him?”
“I left him a small sample of a ne
w kind of snuff this morning. I wondered if he liked it.”
“He don’t want no snuff,” Rehder said. Funny-looking bird. Where did they dig them up? Better test that powder for coke, maybe.
“Well, if he does, he knows where to reach me,” Professor Bingo said politely. “Good afternoon to you.” He touched the brim of the hat, and turned away. He walked slowly, with great dignity. When he had taken three steps Rehder said in his harsh cop voice, which he didn’t use as much as he had once: “Come here a minute, Doc. We might want to talk to you about that snuff. It don’t look like no snuff to me.”
Professor Bingo stopped and turned. His arms were under his opera cloak now. “And just who are you?” he asked Rehder with detached insolence.
“Police officer. There’s been a homicide in this house. It could be that snuff…”
Professor Bingo smiled. “My business is with Mr. Pettigrew, officer.”
“You come back here!” Rehder barked, jerking the door wide. Professor Bingo looked into the hall. He pursed his lips. Otherwise he didn’t move.
“Why, that looks like Mr. Pettigrew on the floor,” he said. “Is he ill?”
“Worse. He’s dead. And like I said—you come back here.”
Professor Bingo took a hand out from under his cloak. There was no weapon in it. Rehder had made a motion towards his hip. He relaxed and let his hand drop.
“Dead, eh?” Professor Bingo smiled almost gaily. “Well you mustn’t let that disturb you, officer. I presume someone shot him as he tried to escape?”
“Come here, you!” Rehder started down the steps.
Professor Bingo waved a long white left hand. “Poor Mr. Pettigrew, he has really been dead for all of ten years. He just didn’t know it, officer.”
Rehder was at the bottom of the steps now. His hand was itching to go for his gun again. Something in Professor Bingo’s eyes made him feel cold all over.
“I imagine you had quite a problem in there,” Professor Bingo said politely. “Quite a problem. But it’s very simple really.”
His right hand came delicately out from under his cloak. His thumb and forefinger were pressed together. They went up towards his face.