Death Likes It Hot (13 page)

The women were called first; then Randan; then me … Brexton was to be last, I saw. For the first time I began to think he might be the murderer.

It was dawn when I joined Greaves in the alcove. The others had gone to bed. Only Brexton was left in the drawing room. The lights were now on. Greaves looked as tired and gray as I felt.

I told him everything that had happened. How Randan and I had talked for almost twenty minutes before discovering the body beneath the swing.

“What time did you arrive at the house of …” he consulted his notes gloomily, “Evan Evans?”

“A few minutes before twelve.”

“There are witnesses to this of course.”

“Certainly.”

“What time did Mr. Randan arrive at this house?”

“About one fifteen, I’d say. I don’t know. It’s hard to keep track of time at a party. We left at one-thirty, though. I remember looking at my watch.” I was positive he was going to ask me why I looked at my watch but he didn’t, showing that he realized such things can happen without significance.

“Then you dropped off Miss Bessemer and came straight here?”

“That’s right.”

“At what time did you find the body?”

“One forty-six. Both Randan and I checked on that.”

Greaves strangled a yawn. “Didn’t touch anything, either of you?”

“Nothing … or maybe I did when I got blood on my fingers, before I knew what was under the swing.”

“What were you doing out there? Why did you happen to sit down on that swing?”

“Well, we’d just come home from the party and there weren’t any lights on in the house and Randan wanted to talk to me about the murder of Mrs. Brexton so we walked around the house and sat down here. I suppose if a light’d been on we’d have gone inside.” I didn’t want to confess I’d been scared to death of going into that house alone.

“Didn’t notice anything odd, did you? No footprints or anything?”

“Nothing. Why were the lights out?”

“We don’t know. Something wrong with the master fuse. One of our men was fixing it while the other stood guard.” Greaves sounded defensive. I could see why.

“And the murder took place at twelve forty-five?”

“How do you know that?” He snapped the question at me, his sleep-heavy eyes opening suddenly wide.

“It fits. Murderer tampers with fuse box; then slips outside, kills Claypoole in the swing while the police and others are busy with the lights; then.…”

“Then what?”

“Well, then I don’t know,” I ended lamely. “Do you?”

“That’s our business.”

“When did the murder take place?”

“None of your …” but for reasons best known to himself, Greaves paused and became reasonable: I was the press as well as a witness and suspect. “The coroner hasn’t made his final report. His guess, though, was that it happened shortly after the lights went out.”

“Where’s the fuse box?”

“Just inside the kitchen door.”

“Was a policeman on guard there?”

“The whole house is patrolled. But that time there was no one in the kitchen.”

“And the door was locked?”

“The door was unlocked.”

“Isn’t that odd? I thought all cooks were mortally afraid of prowlers.”

“The door was locked after the help finished washing up around eleven. We have no idea yet who unlocked it.”

“Fingerprints?”

Greaves only shrugged wearily.

“Any new suspects?”

“No statement, Mr. Sargeant.” He looked at me coldly.

“I have a perfect alibi. I’m trustworthy.” I looked at him with what I thought were great ingenuous spaniel eyes. He was not moved.

“Perfect alibis are dirt cheap around here,” said the policeman bitterly.

I found out the next morning what he meant.

I awakened at eight thirty from a short but sound sleep. I spent the next half hour scribbling a story for the
Globe
 … eyewitness stuff which I telephoned to the city desk, aware that I was being tuned in on by several heavy breathers. Then I went downstairs to breakfast.

Through the front hall window I caught a glimpse of several newspapermen and photographers arguing pathetically with a plain-clothes man on the porch … I had, I decided, a pretty good deal, all in all … if I stayed alive of course. The possibility that one of the guests was a homicidal maniac had already occurred to me; in which case I was as fair a victim as anyone else. I decided the time had come to set my own investigation rolling … the only question was where?

In the dining room a twitchy butler served me eggs and toast. Only Randan was also down. He was radiant with excitement. “They asked me to stay over, the police asked me, so I spent the night in my uncle’s room.”

“Wasn’t that disagreeable?”

“You mean Allie?” His face became suddenly gloomy. “Yes, it was pretty awful. But of course the nurse stayed with her all night, knocking her out, I guess, pretty regularly. I didn’t hear anything much even though the walls around here are like paper. It was also kind of awful being in Fletcher’s bed like that … luckily, the police took all his things away with them.”

“You see anybody yet this morning?”

He shook his head, his mouth full of toast. “Nobody around except the police and the reporters out front. They certainly got here fast.”

“It’ll be in the afternoon papers,” I said wisely. “Have they found out anything yet about the way he was killed?”

“Don’t know. I couldn’t get much out of Greaves. As a matter of fact he got sore when I asked him some questions … said one amateur detective was enough for any murder case. Wonder who he meant?”

“ ‘Whom’ he meant,” I said thoughtfully, aware that Harvard’s recent graduates were not as firmly grounded in Fowler’s
English Usage
as my generation. “I expect he meant me.”

“You’re not a private detective, are you?” He looked at me fascinatedly, his eyes gleaming behind their thick lenses.

“No, but I’m an ex-newspaperman and I’ve been mixed up in a couple of things like this. Nothing quite so crazy, though.”

“Crazy? I’ve got a hunch it’s perfectly simple.”

“Well, that’s good to hear. Why keep us in suspense any longer.” My sarcasm was heavy; I am not at my best at breakfast.

“Maybe I won’t.” He looked mysteriously into his coffee cup. I found him as irritating as ever. He was my personal choice for murderer with Mary Western Lung a close second.

“I suppose you think Brexton did it because he’s jealous
and wanted to kill not only his wife but her lover too, selecting a week end at his wife’s aunt’s house as the correct setting for a grisly tableau?”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with that theory … even if you do try to make it sound silly. There’s such a thing as spur-of-the-moment murder, isn’t there? And this was the first chance he had of getting them both together.” Randan was complacent.

“Why wasn’t he cleverer about it? I know most painters are subaverage in intelligence but if he wanted to get away with these murders he couldn’t have picked a worse way of going about it.”

“Well, I’m not saying I think he did it. I’ll make you a bet, though: that I figure this out before either you or Greaves.” I told him I’d take him up on that: twenty dollars even money.

The morning was sunny and cool outdoors; the sea sparkled; the police were everywhere and Greaves, it developed, had moved over from Riverhead and was now staying in the house, in Brexton’s downstairs room (the painter was assigned a room upstairs) and we were all told to stay close to the premises for the rest of the day.

I set to work on the alibis.

Both Mrs. Veering and Miss Lung, it developed, had gone to bed at the same time, about twelve thirty, leaving Allie and Brexton together in the drawing room. Randan was at the club. Claypoole took his last walk at midnight. None of the ladies had, as far as I could tell, an alibi. Allie of course was still knocked out and no one had been able to talk to her. I was beginning to wonder what Greaves had meant by perfect alibis being cheap. I discovered after lunch.

Brexton was treated like a leper at lunch. Everyone was keyed up, and frightened. It was easy for me to get him away from the others.

“Let’s take a walk,” I said. We were standing together on the porch overlooking the ocean.

“I wonder if they’ll let us … or me,” said the painter.

“We can try.” We strolled out the door, pausing a moment on the terrace. New sand had been raked over the dark blood beneath the swing. The sea was calm. No visible sign of death anywhere to mar the day.

We walked, a little self-consciously, past the swing and down onto the sand. A plain-clothes man appeared quietly on the terrace, watching us. “I feel very important,” Brexton smiled dimly. “We’d better not walk far.”

In plain view of the detective, we sat down on the dunes a few yards from the house. “You’re a newspaperman, aren’t you?” Brexton was direct.

“Not exactly. But I’m writing about this for the
Globe.
”

“And you’d like to know how I happened to drown my wife and murder an old family friend on a quiet week end at the beach? That would be telling.” He chuckled grimly.

“Maybe something short of a confession then,” I said, playing along.

“Do you really think I did it?” This was unexpected.

I was honest. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, for a number of reasons that would be of no use to you in court.”

“My own approach exactly.”

“Who do
you
think did it?”

He looked away. With one hand he traced a woman’s torso in the sand: I couldn’t help but watch the ease with which he drew, even without watching the lines … not at all like his abstractions. “I don’t think I’ll say,” he said, finally. “It’s only a hunch. The whole thing’s as puzzling to me as it is to everybody else … more so since most of them are quite sure I did it. I’ll tell you one thing: I couldn’t have committed either murder.”

This had its desired effect. I looked at him with some surprise. “You mean.…”

“Last night when Claypoole was killed, assuming it happened
before one fifteen, just before your arrival on the beach with Randan, I was with Allie Claypoole.”

This of course was the big news; the reason for Greave’s gloom early that morning. “You told the police this?”

“With some pleasure.”

“And they believed you?”

“All they have to do is ask Allie.”

“But she’s been hysterical or unconscious ever since, hasn’t she?”

He frowned slightly. “So they say. But when she’s herself again they’ll find out that there was no way on earth I, or Allie for that matter, could have killed her brother.”

We were both silent. I recalled as closely as I could everything which had happened the night before: had there been any sound when Randan and I circled the house? Any marks upon the sand? All I could see in my mind though was that great dark house in the wild moonlight. Dark! I thought I’d found a hole in his story.

“If you were talking to Miss Claypoole how come you were in the dark? There wasn’t a light on in the house when we got there.”

“We were on the porch, in the moonlight.”

“The porch overlooking the terrace?”

“No, on the south side, the golf course side.”

“I wonder where the police were.”

“One patrolled the house regularly while the other was looking for extra fuses which the butler had mislaid. The policemen had flashlights,” he added, “to round out the picture.”

“Picture of what is the question.”

“Picture of a murderer,” said Brexton softly and with one finger he stabbed the torso of the figure in the sand. I winced involuntarily.

“Is there anything you’d like me to say?” I asked, trying to make myself sound more useful than, in fact, I was. “I’ll be doing another piece tomorrow and.…”

“You might make the point that not only was I with Miss Claypoole when her brother was killed but that my wife was in the habit of taking large quantities of sleeping pills at any time of day or night and that four was an average dose if she was nervous. I’ve tried to tell the police this but they find it inconvenient to believe. Perhaps now they’ll take me seriously.”

“Mrs. Brexton was not murdered? She took the pills herself?”

“Exactly. If I know her, her death was as big a surprise to her as it was to the rest of us.”

“You don’t think she might have wanted to kill herself? to swim out where she knew she’d drown.”

“Kill herself? She planned to live forever! She was that kind.” But he wouldn’t elaborate and soon we went back to the house while the plain-clothes man watched us from the shadow of the porch.

That afternoon Liz paid me a call and we strolled along the beach together to the Club; apparently the policeman didn’t much care what I did.

Liz was lovely and mahogany-dark in a two-piece affair which wasn’t quite a bathing suit but showed nearly as much. I was able to forget my troubles for several minutes at a time while watching her scuff along the sand, her long legs were slender and smooth with red paint flaking off the toenails as she kicked shells and dead starfish.

But she wouldn’t let me forget the murders for one minute. She had read my piece in the
Globe
which was just out, and all the other papers too. “I don’t think it’s safe,” she said after she’d breathlessly recited to me all the bloody details she’d read that afternoon.

“I don’t think so either, Liz, but what can I do?” I was willing to milk this for all it was worth … the thought that she might be erotically excited by danger to the male (cf. behavior of human females in wartime) was appealing, but not precise. Liz, I think, has no imagination at all,
just the usual female suspicion that everything’s going to work out for the worst if some woman doesn’t step in and restore the status to its previous quo. There wasn’t much room for her to step in, though, except to advise.

“Just leave, that’s all you have to do. They can’t stop you. The worst they can do is make you appear at the trial, to testify.” The dramatic possibilities of this seemed to appeal to her; her knowledge of the technicalities were somewhat vague but she was wonderful when she was excited, her eyes glowing and her cheeks a warm pink beneath her tan.